A Curious Little Blog

What is real, the things we see and touch around us, or the ideas of those things?  It seems obvious, but Plato argued that things, being merely transitory, don't really exist in the same way that eternal ideas do.  Ever since then, this "idealist" position has been a major branch of philosophy. It always bothered me, and I am thinking about it again as I read Schopenhauer make the same basic argument.  If something exists in time, it is by definition transitory; everything in time is constantly changing, and there must be a time before and after it existed when the object did not exist.  But the idea of this thing, the template for it, always exists; it even exists outside of time and space.  Therefore, the idea is more real than the thing. I have trouble with the concept of anything "existing" outside of time and space, but that's another argument that I'm not prepared to make at the moment.  My more pertinent objection is that it is too hard to de...

I have been operating under the assumption that Trump's candidacy was a sideshow.  I thought he might grab some attention early, but that no one would take him seriously once the campaign really got underway. This assumption has been gradually undermined in the last six months.  Whereas I thought Trump would fade away, he has instead attracted increasingly serious attention, not only from anti-Establishment types but even from mainstream Republican politicians on a national level. This concerns me.  Trump as a candidate would be terrible for the Republican party, and Trump as a president would be terrible for the nation.  I have two main problems with him.  One is the obvious one that he is not a serious person.  His mind operates at a superficial level on (apparently) just about everything, but especially on politics.  He isn't a professional politician, of course, so he has not thought about these things to the same extent that career politicians...