Iran Catch-All | IRAN WAR - US to BLOCKADE Strait

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I htink we need to be careful not to take statemenets by either the Iranian's or The Trump Administration at the face value of what one might assume the words convey.

If reason still prevailed, one could take both side's staements as "Here are two different plans (US 15 point, Irainian 10 point) and becasue we are going to use these as loose guidleines for for furture negotiations, we are going to call for a cease fire to while we move down the road torwards those negitionations.

Unfortunately, IT IS A GRAVE MISTAKE to assume that that's what is being communicated. Actually the utility of the words used by either side has nothing to do with the MEANING of those words, and rather has only everything to do with the EFFECT of issuing a statement that has those words stung together in that order will have.

I go back the The Menace Of Unreality paper for the quote: "In this shape-shifting context, which endures today, all political philosophy becomes political technology, and the point of ideas and language are not what they represent, but what function they fulfill. The point of any statement is its effect rather than any notion of truth."

I think the best and only interpretation of any of these statements is "The person making this statement thought that saying these words in this order was the most efficatious thing for them to say at the time the statement was made".

Make no mistake, it was ever thus. The critical difference is that most of us were raised in an age where the institutional and normative penalties for stringing random words together (without regrad for the meaning content of those words) were costly enought to make this style of communication less efficatious than adherering to the meaning of the words being said.

I think we can all agree that living in a word that lacks institutional and normative penaties for "bullshitting" (to not put too fine a point on it) really, really sucks.

We need to rebuild the institutions and norms that applied penaties to bullshitters.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
 
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