Tuesday, December 20, 2022

self-undermining statements

You have to love statements that subvert themselves.

"Everything is relative." (variant: "It's all relative.")

By using words like "everything" or "all," you absolutize your claim. So everything is not relative: some absolutes obviously do exist, like your cavalier statement. Which, as we see, is demonstrably false, by the way.

"There is no truth."

When you make this claim, there's an unstated assumption or premise: It is true that there is no truth. All truth-claims take this form, so there is no escaping the existence of truth. "There is no truth" is the sort of self-nullifying nonsense that postmodernists cherish. In their rush to destroy any notion of objective reality, they embrace the fallacious notion that truth (by which is meant objective truth) cannot and does not exist. This is why there are no postmodernist engineers or aircraft designers. If you can't respect reality, reality won't respect you.

Different but maybe related—something I saw on YouTube today:

If you go in for gender reassignment surgery, how many options do you have?

Which leads me to an instant classic:

"I'm non-binary."

By making this valiant but stupid attempt to escape the binary, you merely create a new binary: (1) binary versus (2) non-binary. Great work, champ.



1 comment:

  1. I'm just waiting for the day I get the chance to respond to someone saying, "there is no truth," by exclaiming, "That's the truth!"

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