Professor Kurgman, Help Us

Dear Professor, PhD^3 (is it <i>only</i> three; haven't you had Cracker Jack lately?) please enlighten us.

I keep flying into a rage and I shouldn't have to. Why, I hear you ask, does Herr Doktor Commissar Theocritus, commissar of conspicuous compassion, fly into a rage all of the time? Since you ask, and I hear you ask all the time in messages in my bridgework, I'll tell you.

I hate facts. Or what people call facts. Facts are nothing but an irritant. What do facts know? <i>Nothing</i>. People sometimes tell me things which they say are facts and it shuts off the flow, the glorious flow, of sneering egestion which is my <i>métier</i>. And we can't have that.

A fact is a difficult thing. When a fact pops its head up, you have to either lie, or destroy the bringer of the fact. There's no other way, and that takes some serious time out of my real love, which is two-fisted lying just to make me feel big and better and handsome and strong and lets me tell people what to do and gets me invitations to all the best parties.

Can you see why I hate facts? I am sure that you understand why I hate facts. You hate facts; you may be in an Ivy League college, but you and I know that that in general just helps you in your quotidian war against facts. After all, nothing does in a fact better than a sneer from Harvard Yard.

~

So I have an idea. Let's just declare empiricism dead. Just because the sun has risen, oh, a few billion times in the past doesn't mean that it will rise tomorrow. That is unless it's convenient that it rise. I really don't see why the Party ought to be beholden to mere facts because they're so limiting.

Facts should be outlawed. Facts mean nothing. Now I know that if you're something tiresome like an engineer, you might have a sentimental attachment to facts. You know, if you ignore facts that airplane might fall from the sky. Or that 100-storey skyscraper might collapse because it wasn't engineered right. But engineering isn't really a People's Science. Because it is hostage to the rules of nature. I am talking about <i>real facts</i>. Which are the sort of things that Joe the Biden says. They have no connection with truth, but so what? He's not making airplanes and by the time that those chickens come home to roost, economic collapse, socialism, we'll all have all we need in the South of France. Or Bali. Or if we stay here we'll have the wonderful, life-enhancing roll of telling people that we'll lead them, out of the mess that we created. It's like being Hannibal Lecter and billing the estates of the people we killed, and getting paid.

Professor, I posit, for your humble approval, the position that we need not worry about anything that is true unless something's about to fall down. And if it is, we can lie, lie, lie, and point fingers at the Rethuglicans and make it their fault.

Oh, by the way, the Black Death was the Republicans' fault. Wasn't it?

Facts poison the imagination and the endless possibilities of otherwise impossible and impropable possibilities from ever occuring. So yes, I share Theocritus' disgust in these... these... "facts".

Also... I hate Arthur Laffer and would like him denounced by Dr. Dr. Dr. Kurgman for good measure.

Laffer, who is this Laffer person? I vaguely remember someone with that name but wasn't he made an unperson?

While we're at it, I propose that we make Adam Smith and Milton Friedman unpersons. Also Hayek. What about Carl Popper? He needs to be an unperson too.

Any more candidates for unpersonhood?

Not to worry, "fact's" days are numbered comrades. (Figuratively speaking of course, numbers are next.) The schools teach our young pioneers to "feel" about issues. Facts are being elbowed aside aside as quickly as possible. Ask an Obama-youth to repeat party doctrine and you will get "I think" or "I feel" in place of affirmative facts.

Progress is also being made with respect to what used to be called totally objective knowledge. Ask an oldster something they couldn't possibly know, and you get, "I have no @%^*ing idea". Ask a youth, and you get the much more self-esteemy, "I'm not sure."

Change you will feel! '08

We need a department called Planned Unpersonhood here at the Cube. We are Communist, dammit! Everything should be planned!

Bubba, how right you are. What about Sensitive Physics? "I feel that the answer should be 3."

"Wonderful, Johnny. Actually it's 1/2π but who's counting? You <i>felt</i> so beautifully."

Or Politically Correct Biology. "I think that Jimmy has endometriosis."

"Perfect, Johnny. Actually he's dying of prostate cancer but it's unfair that men not feel women's problems."

Meow, I nominate Pupovich to be the Chairdog of the department of Planned Unpersonhood. The Soviet Encyclopedia came with new pages and a razor blade. We can do so much better with Photoshop these days. And electro-convulsive therapy.

Greetings Comrades, I call upon all of the true non fact believers, or if you will fact deniers,( they really are quite troublesome ), to heed Commissar Comrade Theocritus' words. Soon we will be returned to the glory of those heady days when facts were brushed aside as a mere nuisance.

Comrades, facts are what we determine them to be.

And how right you are. A fact is a trifling thing. We all know that Adam Smith's invisible hand will brook no back-talk, but why not make someone else pay for it?

<b>For the entire whole fucking point of being a commissar is that someone else pays.</b>

Theocritus -

The main concept that I distill from your thoughtful post is that hate is an element of facts.

But since the facts are fluid, they can be used to lubricate the developed mind into postcultural deappropriations of mythopoetical paradoxes and other contextualized intrapolated dialectic narratives without any distinctions of self-referential rationalism or presemantic desituationisms.

I agree.

Brainiac Kurgman PhD ad nauseam wrote:But since the facts are fluid, they can be used to lubricate the developed mind into <i>postcultural</i> deappropriations of mythopoetical paradoxes and other contextualized intrapolated dialectic narratives without any distinctions of self-referential rationalism or presemantic desituationisms

After that bit of elucubration, celebrated professor of professors, I have a moment of postcoital bliss. My mind is limp in the afterglow.

But there is one caveat: we cannot let our paratetrologies exorbiculate munitractly.

Or it all falls the hell apart and reality gets a look in.

QED.

Quod erat dumbass.

Facts will not be a problem, Comrades, after The Progressive World of Next Tuesday^TM.

Then, as Comrade O'Brien knows, the facts will belong to The State and never change. When The State completely controls the facts, the thought criminals will not be able to corrupt the true facts of The State as they do now.

Comrade Pul, to recall though that since the Constitution is to be shredded, and when the Chosen One packs the Supremes with justices concerned with "social justice" and "fairness," then it will be the death of contract and the rule of law.

So there is nothing whatsoever to keep facts from being as infinitely elastic as the Constitution will be. That is what's left of it in the minds of some old fools like Bob Bork and Clarence Thomas.

It is to laugh. To think that those men actually bothered with law school and decided to judge cases by what some document written by dead white European males said. All that work with no chance to express themselves? They could have been journalists, and therefore be completely unencumbered by facts.

<off>The NYT is junk stock! I wet 'em every day laughing.