Reddit reviews The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America

That was indeed awesome. Here is a link to the book if anyone is interested.

Everybody on the web (and plenty of people IRL) compare things they dislike or disagree with to Hitler/Auschwitz. Reductio ad Hitlerum.

Indeed:
“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." --Immanuel Kant, Preface to the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason

Kant refuted "proofs" of God's existence, not to show that belief in God is untenable, or to show the triumph of reason over religion, but as part of his project of attacking the efficacy of reason in metaphysical issues. He wanted to show that reason can't cope with the question of a deity, just as he had purported to do with other fundamental concepts in his "antinomies of pure reason."

Kant was a profound turning point in the history of philosophy. It was his influence on the intellectual life of the West that was primarily responsible for making non-rational "forms of knowledge" (faith/emotion-based beliefs) respectable again, after the Enlightenment.

I recommend a book called The Ominous Parallels. It really shows the power of philosophy to shape history.

No, this describes their philosophy.

I really cannot explain all the concepts in a quote.. nor a picture.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ominous-Parallels-End-Freedom-America/dp/0452011175/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3ROUU99CWA6F3&keywords=the+ominous+parallels&qid=1555697098&s=gateway&sprefix=the+ominous+p%2Caps%2C128&sr=8-1

btw, this was a better explanation of what happened in Nazi Germany than the book 'ordinary men'.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ominous-Parallels-Freedom-America/dp/0452011175

I haven't read this yet, but I'll just leave it here...

http://www.amazon.com/Ominous-Parallels-Brilliant-parallels-pre-Hitler/dp/0452011175

As far as I'm concerned, nearly the entire school of postmodernism rises from rotten soil (largely German idealism, Continential philosophy, Marxism, and phenomenology) and is thoroughly anti-rational. One of my favorite philosophy books, The Ominous Parallels examines how German idealism and postmodernism gave rise to totalitarian political philosophies (especially the Nazis) and how even post-fascism, post-modernism is still pushing people in the same direction.

In essence post-modernism argues that because nearly all human knowledge has its ultimate origin in some subjective judgment or observation about the world, therefore all human knowledge is subject to subjective interpretation and criticism. It seeks to undermine rationality (man's primary tool for making sense of the world) by declaring everything to subjective and/or a social construct - to be interpreted by the viewer in any way they see fit. As if all history is just the story we agree to tell, all science is just people's best guesses, economics how we steal from each other, and philosophy the lies we tell to justify the world being how it is.

My next big beef with post-modernism is their willful exercise of obscurantism. The term refers to the deliberate use of vague, unclear, or jargon-heavy language for the purpose of concealing the true meaning of the text, rather than just saying it in clear and understandable prose. Derrida is practically the poster-boy for this, and he learned from Heidegger the card-carrying Nazi.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, I'm one of the most voracious readers I've ever met. I'm the kinda guy who reads philosophy for fun, and I've read a lot of it. And every time I've tried to read post-modernist texts, I've walked away in frustration as I had no idea what they were actually trying to say. Their logic is invariably impossible to follow, their texts filled with bullshit and filler, and their actual ideas to be thin gruel and trivial at best, or flat out wrong at worst.

The unsophisticated and uncritical often mistake obscurantist texts for having profound deep meanings that ordinary person just doesn't understand. I consider that bullshit. To me, obscurantism is the hallmark of the intellectual fraud. The purpose of language is communicate clear and consistent meanings, not to distort, confuse, and hide meaning. Unfortunately it has a long tradition in bad philosophy - Kant was a past master of the art.

To me, Foucault is a thinly-veiled Marxist sadomasochist. Kant (the ultimately ancestor of postmodernism) an OCD-sufferer who undermined rationality in order to attempt a reconciliation of science and Church dogma. Heidegger a nihilistic Nazi. And as for Derrida, I think he's one of the biggest frauds of them all. I haven't seen a single idea of his that I think has any merit and I consider his boast that his work is impossible to criticize as proof positive that he is a fraud, and worse, a dangerous fraud.

To me, philosophy must come correct and be written for the purpose of being understood by most if not all who read it, or else it's simply not philosophy worth reading. If you can't or won't communicate the meaning behind your thoughts clearly, then you have no business calling yourself a philosopher or having your thoughts taken seriously.

> ". . . anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity, by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."

-- John Searle on Deconstruction