Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz

The comparison between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz is interesting.
Both candidates make remarks, which are, by today's standards of universal values and human rights, very questionable, to put it mildly.

However, when Mr. Trump makes remarks, for example about walls and immigration, it sounds as if he does not really mean it. It is as if he is just acting like a macho, in the great reality TV show that is the US Presidential election.

On the other hand, when Mr. Cruz says something, it appears as if he is really meaning it. Which is, after all, what earnest Presidential candidates are supposed to do. However, in this case, it makes Mr. Cruz even more scary.

There is another interesting difference between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz. When Mr. Trump delivers judgment, he seems to be doing so from his own experiences and value systems. It is an individualistic act. When Mr. Cruz says something, on the other hand, he seems to be referring to supposedly important communal values.

In sum, Mr. Cruz seems to be of a more "deep" case than Mr. Trump, especially because the candidate apparently lacks a metacognition of what he is doing.

Sunday, April 03, 2016

The tyranny of time.

I sometimes feel that the most powerful in this world is time.
People might talk about Presidents and Prime ministers as examples of the apotheosis of power, but at the end of the day nobody can beat time.

I was a child once, and I sometimes look back on how I used to feel, see the world around me through a lens of enchantment. The child that I was is no longer here. I am a different person, although  a fragile belief based on my memory system would like to rely on the continuity of me from my childhood to the present day, as an assumption.

The fact that the ambience of times past would never return is the most dramatic constituent element of the world  we live in. Memory and records are but insufficient solaces for life when faced with the utmost brutality of the passage of time.

I conclude that time is the only tyrant in this world. Hope is a reaction to the brutality of time with which we soldier on. Contemporary physics has nothing to do with this greatest mystery. In a sense, science has done nothing towards softening the blows of temporality.