이 나라 완전 끝났다. 지금태어나는애들은 평생 허리끊어지도록 일해야 된다. 버뮤다의전설 http://www.ilbe.com/view/11292797106 국가·가계·기업 빚 모두 역대 최대…합치면 5천조 육박 공공기관 포함 국가부채 2,198조·가계부채 1,600조·기업부채 1,118조 추경호 "부채의 덫에 경제주체 활동 폭 위축…위기대응능력도 약화" ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 한국경제 나라살림 빨간불…국가부채 2000조 육박, 적자 '사상 최대' 정부 재무제표 결산 결과 작년 국가부채는 1985조3000억원으로 전년 대비 241조6000억원(13.9%) 증가했다. 국가부채가 국내총생산(GDP: 지난해 1924조원)보다 많아진 것은 발생주의 개념을 도입해 국가결산 보고서를 작성하기 시작한 2012년 이후 처음이다. 코로나19 극복을 위한 4차례 추경(67조원) 등으로 국채발행이 증가하며 국공채 등 확정부채가 111조6000억원 늘어난 영향이다. 주택거래 증가로 국민주택채권(+2조5000억원), 외환시장 안정화를 위한 외평채(+1조3000억원) 잔액도 1년 전보다 증가했다. 공무원·군인연금의 연금충당부채(+100조5000억원), 주택도시기금 청약저축(+11조1000억원) 등 비확정부채는 전년대비 130조원 늘었다. 연금충당부채 증가는 최근 저금리에 따른 할인율 조정 등 재무적 요인에 의한 증가액이 대부분이다.2019년 사상 처음으로 700조원을 넘어섰던 중앙·지방정부 채무는 지난해 846조9000억원으로 전년대비 123조7000억원 증가하며 800조원대에 진입했다. 통계청이 집계한 지난해 총인구(5178만1000명)로 나누면 1인당 국가채무는 약 1636만원 수준으로 전년대비 227만원가량 늘었다. GDP 대비 국가채무 비율은 44.0%로 2019년 결산(37.7%) 때보다 6.3%p 상승했다. thdg**** 좌파넘들이 김대중땐 나라팔아먹고.문좌파넘은 빚이 2천조 기가막힌다.세금은 폭등시키고 돈은 막 퍼주고.결국 나라 빚이 2천조 ㅡ때려죽일놈 이미 거덜 났지요. 70년간의 국가부채를 단 5년만에 2배로. 이제 가속도는 더 붙고. 근데 헛돈만 뿌렸지, 경제는 계속 더 악화. 이 정도면 무능을 넘어선 범죄지요. yooc**** 지난 문재앙 강점기 4년동안 망조가 난 대한민국ㅠㅠㅠㅠ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 나라 빚 하루에 3천억 늘어난다. 한국 성장불능에 빠졌다. 대한민국 부도위기 시대정신연구소 https://youtu.be/aW7dR5W9wv0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 한국경제TV 110년에 풀린 '핵 얼룩' 비밀…획기적인 항암 치료제 개발 기대감 땡구. 항암제 현실 신약개발! 생존율 증가! 암정복 멀지 않았다 라고 발표 하며 암환자들에게 큰 희망을줌 근데 이것도 자세히 알고보면 무당치료,기도치료,자연치료,한약치료랑 다를바가 없음 결국 항암제도 기적을 바라면서 믿음 치료 하는거나 마찬가지 ㅋ 그리고 신약은 존나 개비쌈 억대는 기본임 비싼 항암치료도 결국 1~2년 생명줄만 늘려줄뿐 효과본사람 진짜 별로없음 ---> 환원론적인 접근으로는 인체도 질병도 알 수가 없다. 저런 방식으론 병을 치료할 수 없다. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 중앙일보 [단독]투표권 기준 충족 외국인 80%는 중국인…중화권 88% quit**** 외국인에 투표권주는 나라는 한국밖에 없을거다내년 대선 더불어만진당이 된다면 중국 속국 당첨! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 영화 '살인의 추억' 보고 '사월의 추억' 떠올라 이봉규 티비 https://youtu.be/cl9nHb_VNdQ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 대한민국의 미래가 참으로 걱정된다.... 백마응디팡팡 http://www.ilbe.com/view/11334335186 제주도부더 시작해서 전국적으로 중국 세력들이 몰려오고있다. 부동산부터 시작해서 중소기업들도 중국한태 먹히고. 정말 답이 없다. 이제 앞으로는. 중국놈들땜에 일자리 뺏기는 사람들도 많이 생길거다. 중국인 사장밑에서 일하면서 월듭받는놈들도 생길거고 중국인 집주인한테 집빌려서 월세 주는놈들도 더더욱 많아질거고... 강원도 차이나 타운 건설,, 이제주터 본격적으로 시작일거다.. 정말 대한민국의 미래가 암울하다.. 이게다 문죄인 개새끼때문이다!!!!!!!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 不勞所得을 취하는 집단은 부동산이 아니고 폭력으로 결정된 "민노총의 高임금"이다 좌빨잡자 http://www.ilbe.com/view/11334248395 자본시장에서는 시장에서 시세대로 거래된 가격에 "不勞"라고 주장하는 잉간들은 한마디로 무식을 드러낸 거거나 폭력혁명을 꿈꾸는 공산주의 독재숭배자다. 어떤 거래대상이든 시중가격대로 거래됬으면 문제 삼으면 "共産도배"로 낙인찍어도 좋다. 그건 악질 공산주의자로 낙인 찍어도 좋다. 그 거래에서 발생한 이익 또한 엄연한 투자수익임을 잊어서는 안된다. 그런데, 한국의 불로소득은 딱 한곳에 존재한다. 바로, 민주노총이, 시장가격을 짓밟고 회사와 "강제로 맺은" 노임이다. 이게 바로 不勞所得이란 사실을 분명하게 알아라.... 이건 절대 용서되거나 있어서는 안되는 진짜"惡質 不勞所得이다." 반드시 가혹하게 때려 부숴야 대한민국이 산다.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 미얀마 사태 미국이 개입 안하는 이유 응애맘마줘 http://www.ilbe.com/view/11334229258 중국은 석유를 그동안 미군이 장악한 말라카 해협을 통해서 수입했음 이걸 미얀마에 파이프 가스관 둘다 뚫어서 미군이 장악한 지역을 피해서 직접 들여오는 노선을 만들어 그동안 미군이 장악한 말라카 해협을 통해서 수입하던 루트를 피함 이렇게 되면서 당연히 미얀마는 친중국가가 되었고 중국은 미군 장악한 지역을 거치지않고 중동에서 석유를 가지고옴 미국은 미얀마에 완벽한 친미세력이 들어서기전까지 개입하지 않고 내전 상태로 냅둘거임 그래야 중국 석유 보급에 차질이 생김 중국은 에너지 자립도가 무지하게 낮음 온갖방법으로 미국을 피해서 석유를 수입하는 루트를 만들려고 다양한 시도를 했고 그중 하나가 미얀마 중국 파이프라인임 현재 미얀마 사태가 격화됨에 따라서 가스관 잠기거나 폭파될까봐 중국이 개입하고 싶어서 안달났지만 만약 개입하게 되면 미국이 즉각 개입할 명분을 주기때문에 똥줄타면서 이러지도 저러지도 못하는 상황 미국으로서는 현재 상황으로 냅두는것도 좋음 절대 먼저 개입하지 않을것임 3줄요약 1.중국은 미국이 장악한 지역을 피해서 미얀마에 파이프라인을뚫어서 석유를 수급하고 있음 2.미얀마 사태가 내전상태에 들어감에 따라서 이 파이프라인이 가동되지 않을 확률이 높아짐 3.중국은 이사태에 개입하고 싶어하지만 그렇게 되면 미국이 개입하게될 명분을 주어서 하지못함 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 뉴스1 유럽의약품청 "AZ백신과 혈전 부작용 분명히 연관 있다" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nassim Nicholas Taleb By definition, if you are trying to measure your success, you are unsuccessful; and if you are trying to measure your happiness, you are unhappy. 성공도 행복도 측정할 수 없다. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 왜 포스트모더니즘은 자유의 정치와 양립할 수 없는가? 포스트모더니즘은 개인을 언어와 사회적 요인 등에 의해 구성된 단순한 산물로 간주하고 나아가 개인의 주체적 결정을 부정하기 때문에, 자유와 양립할 수 없다. 포스트모더니즘은 또 진리를 거부하고 주관적 신념을 더 선호한다. 나(필자)와 논쟁을 벌인 러셀은 포스트모더니즘의 인식론적인 주관주의, 회의론, 이상론 등을 인식에서의 겸손이라고 주장한다. 그리고 그것이 메타담론( metanarratives)을 거부하는 것은 자유를 위한 것이라고 믿는다. 하지만 우리의 신념이 객관적인 세계에 의해 제한되지 않으면, 자신의 신념이 무오류라는 충동에 이끌리기 쉽다. 미셀 푸코 등의 주장처럼 모든 것이 권력 투쟁이라면, 또 진리라는 것이 없고, 객관적인 제약이 부재한다면. 자의적인 신념을 사람들에게 강요하게 되는데, 그게 바로 권위주의 체제가 되는 것이다. 결국 포스트모더니즘은 종교적 신념처럼 되고 만다. 우리는 그 증거를 사회적 정의 운동에서 찾을 수 있다. 스티븐 힉스는, 포스트모더니즘을 학문적 극좌들이 사회주의 실패에 의해 초래된 위기에 대처하기 위해 마련한 인식론적 전략이라고 주장한다. 데리다는 텍스트 밖에는 아무 것도 없다고 했는데, 이로써 포스트모더니스트들은 객관적인 현실을 부정하고 있다. 언어와 객관적인 세계의 관계를 부정함으로써, 포스트모더니즘은 진리에 대한 추구를 포기한다. 앨런 소칼은 이들을 조롱하기 위해 가짜 논문을 써서, 중력 자체가 사회적 구성체라는 주장을 펼치기도 했다. 전체주의는 거짓 신념을 강요함으로써 성립한다. 그런데 포스트모더니즘은 의도적으로 신념에 대한 판단을 방해함으로써, 스스로 전체주의에 굴복하고 만다. Why Postmodernism Is Incompatible with a Politics of Liberty Michael Rectenwald Several months ago, I debated Thaddeus Russell on The Tom Woods Show. The proposition debated was “Postmodern philosophy is compatible with a politics of individual liberty.” Thaddeus defended the proposition and I opposed it. Here, I want to flesh out some of the points I made in the debate, adding more context than I could marshal under the constraints of the format. For better or worse, this requires a somewhat deep dive into postmodern ideas. Postmodernism, I argue, is incompatible with liberty, first because it sees the individual as a mere product, as constructed by language, social factors, and so on. As such, postmodernism effectively denies self-determination and individual agency. Second, the cultural obsession with social identity that is current today derives from the social constructivism of postmodern philosophy. Such social constructivism further denies individual agency. The very concept of truth, meanwhile, is denied in favor of subjective belief. For reasons discussed below, the denial of the concept of truth is anathema to liberty. Thaddeus Russell takes postmodernism’s “anything goes” epistemological subjectivism, skepticism, and idealism for epistemic “humility.” That is, because postmodernism eschews or denies “truth” and suggests that there are merely different “narratives” that pass for truth, it allows for people to escape from the truth claims that others, like the state, would impose on them. Its rejection of metanarratives is liberational and Russell takes this as an invocation of freedom. But this is a mistake. As I argued in Springtime for Snowflakes: Once beliefs are unconstrained by the object world … the possibility for assuming a pretense of infallibility becomes almost irresistible, especially when the requisite power is available to support such beliefs. In fact, given its willy-nilly determination of truth and reality on the basis of beliefs alone, philosophical and social idealism necessarily becomes dogmatic, authoritarian, anti-rational, and effectively religious. I mean that when coupled with the premium that Michel Foucault, Jean François Lyotard, and others place on power, when everything is a power struggle, the lack of objective constraints, the lack of belief in “truth,” or any criteria for the judgment of facts, opens us up to the arbitrary imposition of beliefs—to authoritarianism. When “my truth” becomes as good or better than any objective truth, or any attempts to approach truth, when “lived experience” trumps facts, then, when one has the requisite power, one can impose one’s truth claims with apparent impunity. There is nothing to push back against belief. When objective criteria are eliminated, there is no court of appeal—other than authority. The ideal of objectivity, always asymptotically approached, should be the court of appeal, but it is thrown out in advance by postmodernism. So, postmodernism resembles nothing more than it does the religious creeds that Russell apparently deplores. We see this playing in the social justice movement. And, contrary to what Russell maintains—that social justice has nothing to do with postmodernism—social justice ideology adopts the postmodern epistemology, and this adoption has consequences. Take transgenderism for example. When belief is unmoored from observation, and when such unmoored belief is institutionalized as it is today, it leads to the abolition of others’ rights, including the right to make statements about observable facts. One is compelled to acknowledge the self-described genders of believers and to use their self-assigned pronouns, or else. If one denies the self-declared gender of one’s child, one may lose custody, or may even be thrown in jail. Similarly, critical race theory, which derives its epistemology from postmodernism, posits “lived experience” above all other criteria. Statistics, historical evidence, etc., are of no importance. “Stories” become the only valid evidence, and such stories are unfalsifiable. When coupled with state and institutional power, such unmoored belief becomes dictatorial. Believe my lived experience, or else. You must take me at my word. You must accept my unfalsifiable stories. In Explaining Postmodernism, Stephen Hicks has a related but different explanation. He suggests that the postmodern epistemology is a cover for the authoritarianism of postmodernism. With its extreme epistemological subjectivism and skepticism, the postmodern epistemology allows postmodernists to deny socialism’s historical failures, while maintaining its ethos and goals. As Hicks puts it, “Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.” This would account for the authoritarianism of such postmodernists as the literary critic Stanley Fish, who in his most recent book, The First, argues for the curtailment of First Amendment rights, including the elimination of religious expression in the public square and the elimination of speech that others find offensive or harmful. If given power, Fish would no doubt impose such sanctions. Thus, Camille Paglia is right in calling Fish a “totalitarian Tinkerbell.” While Hicks’s argument has merit, it doesn’t explain the connection between the authoritarianism and the epistemology, except as an incidental relationship. My explanation, as I have said, is that epistemological subjectivism, idealism, and relativism are intrinsically connected to authoritarianism. Take the case of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, for example. Despite the claim that Marxism is materialist and objective, Lysenkoism was an example of philosophical idealism wielded by the state. The neo-Lamarckian creed became state policy and led to widespread famine and the death of millions, as well as one of the worst witch hunts in the history of science. Lysenkoism underscores the danger of denying our best science. There was a better biological science at the time—Mendelian genetics coupled with the Darwinian model of natural selection. Agreement with this better science could have saved millions of lives. The authoritarianism of unmoored belief led to famine and persecution. In the debate, Russell suggested that I was antilibertarian because I referred to “objective constraints on discourse.” But I did not refer to “objective constraints on discourse.” I referred to objective constraints, period. I didn’t thereby suggest that states could impose constraints on discourse with impunity. I meant that the material world imposes constraints on us. We deny these constraints at our own peril. My second main point concerned Russell’s crediting postmodernism with the gains of liberation movements like feminism, civil rights, etc. “Postmodernism allows people to escape the social constructs that contain them,” Thaddeus’s story goes. But feminism, for one, doesn’t need postmodernism, and it never did. Further, it would be much better off without it. Feminism preceded postmodernism by decades, if not centuries. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, argued effectively for the expansion of women's rights in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. And Wollstonecraft wrote very much in the Enlightenment, modernist tradition, extending Enlightenment ideals and ideas to the case of women. The suffragette movement preceded postmodernism by decades. The best feminism, like the best movements for civil rights, have involved the extension of Enlightenment ideas and ideals. So, feminism did not need postmodernism, and neither did civil rights. In fact, postmodernism has done nothing for feminism, except to befuddle feminists with notions of social constructivism and psychoanalytic theory—self-constructed boxes they’ve been trying to fight their way out of ever since. For feminists, the social construction of gender does not mean that gender can be wished away. Instead, escaping it is a never-ending struggle—to undo the supposed effects of “patriarchy,” or the phallus, in the case of the psychoanalytic feminists who followed Jacques Lacan. Yet even gender constructivism preceded postmodern theory. In the psychological literature, the word “gender” was first applied to human sex difference in 1955, when the “sexologist” John Money introduced the phrase “gender roles.” From there it became not only gender roles that were constructed but also gender itself. Later, sex difference was deemed to be socially constructed as well. This is why I have called John Money’s intervention “the gender jackpot.” Ever since Money, gender has multiplied and sought ever-new pronouns, an absurd development that institutions have ludicrously attempted to keep pace with. The ironic result of gender constructivism is that feminism is now being run by people with penises. If gender is a social construct, then anyone can adopt the gender of their choice. Thus, males can be women. But that isn’t even what feminists meant by the idea. They saw gender constructs as obdurate social categories that had been established by long-standing conventions and enforced in multiple, almost inscrutable ways. For these feminists, gen­der was no less real for being socially constructed. Undermining gender involved a long, arduous social struggle. And gender-critical feminists figured sex and gender as tightly coupled. The attack of second-wave feminists was not against biology but against socialization and social constraints based on biology. They did not suggest that sex itself was socially constructed, only that roles based on sex were socially constructed. Postmodernism, in third-wave feminism, suggests that sex itself is a social construct. While our ideas about it surely are socially constructed, sex difference exists no matter what we think about it. Gender difference and sex difference are very different things. Yes, sex roles, or gender roles, have changed across time, but, to the best of our knowledge, sex difference itself has not, at least not appreciably. And thank goodness for that—unless you believe, with some postmodern environmentalists, that human reproduction is “evil.” Furthermore, that postmodernists, according to Russell, don’t believe in biological determinism doesn’t make biology any less determining. We are more or less biologically determined. I’ll say more about this below. But I believe that the introduction of the concept of “gender constructivism” to describe human beings has been pernicious, causing confusion and doing immeasurable harm to feminism and Western culture at large. Meanwhile, the idea that gender is a social construct—determined by social factors—can be as deterministic as biological determinism. This is especially the case in the hands of postmodern theory. That’s because, under postmodern theory, the notion of the autonomous, preexisting self itself is denied. The self becomes nothing but a mere aftereffect, a product of language and/or other social factors. Under postmodernism, the self is “decentered,” that is, removed from the center of history and importance. And the agency of the self is virtually denied. We can read this in the writing of the poststructuralists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, for example, in “The Death of the Author” and “What Is an Author?,” respectively. Here, we find that authors do not create texts. Texts produce their authors! Authors, and, by extension, the human subject itself, is the mere product of text. Or, as described by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1979), the self is a mere “node” in a communications circuit. Lyotard made his demotion of the self quite explicit: “And each of us knows that our self does not amount to much…. A self does not amount to much.” This is hardly a formula for self-determination, which requires individual agency, agency that postmodernism denies human beings. Libertarianism requires the individual (the first form of property) and postmodernism denies the individual. To the extent that Russell values the individual, I argued, he’s not a postmodernist. To the extent that he buys into postmodernism’s denial of the self-determining individual agent, he’s not a libertarian. Furthermore, postmodernism’s constant emphasis on social constructs suggests that they are all-determining. This accounts for the social justice obsession with social identity categories and its denial of individual identity and agency. Every outcome is determined by gender, race, or what have you. Everyone is reduced to their social identity category. This obsession has led to the rabid identity politics of such groups as Black Lives Matter, who see race as the sole determining factor for everything that happens to persons of color. Such determinism denies their individual agency, reducing them to mere objects of history. Meanwhile, there are different kinds of social constructivism. My epistemology may be called, following David Hess, a “moderate constructivism.” Hess advanced the term in his An Advanced Introduction to Science Studies (1997) to refer to a position that regards science as representing its natural object(s) and the social and political orders, rather than either one exclusively. Martin J.S. Rudwick developed a similar standpoint based on his detailed and remarkable study of the Devonian controversy in geology. Rudwick suggested that “a consensual product of scientific debate can be regarded as both artifactual and natural, as a thoroughly social construction that may nonetheless be a reliable representation of the natural world.” The point is that there is a difference between the social construction of knowledge and the utter incommensurability of knowledge and the object world. The latter implies that scientific knowledge is constructed, willy-nilly, and even that the object world itself is socially constructed. Thaddeus Russell, like postmodern science studies critics, confuses the two. The latter leads to an epistemological nihilism, because no one’s construction is any better than anyone else’s. Take Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979) by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, for example. Laboratory Life is an anthropological examination of a scientific labora­tory as a strange but not altogether exotic culture. Almost “going native,” but not quite, the assumed strange­ness effect allowed Latour and Woolgar to see science’s final product in terms of what they called “literary inscription,” or writing. Despite Latour’s subsequent break with the implications of “the social construc­tion of scientific facts” arrived at in Laboratory Life, this first book is constructivist through and through. The anthropologists aimed to show that “the construction of scientific facts, in particular, is a process of generating texts whose fate (status, value, utility, facticity) depends on their subsequent interpretation.” Latour and Woolgar thus reduced the objects of scientific knowledge to “text,” just as Jacques Derrida had done with ontologies in philosophy. Of course, a fallacy was at work. Latour and Woolgar’s sleight of hand demonstrated that scientific facts exist only within texts—“there is no outside of text,” to quote Derrida. But as with all magic tricks, the deception had taken place earlier, before we were looking. Latour and Woolgar stealthily conflated the knowledge of scientific facts—established in the process of science and expressed in language—and the reality referred to by that knowledge. Confusing knowledge and the objects of knowledge, our postmodern magicians seemed to make the material world itself disappear into the text. The error is known as the fallacy of reification—or treating an abstraction, like the knowledge of an object, as equivalent to a concrete object or thing, like the object to which the knowledge refers. Russell makes the same mistake. In Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida wrote that “[t]here is nothing outside of text.” So, some postmodernists do in fact deny objective reality, contrary to Russell’s claim. Derrida’s Of Grammatology is a philosophical excursus into the philosophy of language. It draws on Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of the sign—the signifier-signified-referent construction—to undermine any relationship between language and the object world. The sign is the word, which has no necessary relationship to what it refers to. The signifier points to a signified, or an idea, not to the referent, or something in the object world. Derrida goes further than Saussure and breaks the connection been the signifier and the signified, arguing for the self-referentiality of the signifier. The signifier points to itself and not to the signified. But Derrida also ends up conflating the signified and the referent and thereby denying any relationship of language to the object world. This makes him an epistemological nihilist. Knowledge becomes virtually impossible under such a sign system. Language, however, is a tool. It allows us to connect particular words to particular objects, more or less accurately defined, thus enhancing their use and manipulation. To pretend otherwise is sheer nonsense. (The title Of Grammatology allows us to find Derrida’s ideas in said book by that title.) The point here is that by denying a relationship between language and the object world, postmodernism abandons truth claims, as does Russell himself. This epistemological nihilism would not be a problem if not for its likely consequences. In “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Alan Sokal argued, parodically, that gravity itself is a social construct. The postmodernists at Social Text fell for the parody. The Sokal Hoax pointed to the absurdity of the postmodern position inaugurated by Derrida as applied to science. Take the denial of biological determinism that Russell vaunts as a credit to postmodernism. Forget about identity categories for a moment. We are more or less biologically determined and ignoring the extent of our biological determination can be dangerous. The key is to find out just how biologically determined we are, and in what ways. To investigate the extent and ways by which we are biologically determined is not necessarily to cede authority to the state, as Russell suggested in the debate. Rather, it allows us to approach an understanding of the scope of freedom itself. Liberty, if it is to be meaningful, depends on the acknowledgement of constraints—those imposed by the object world, and those imposed by other people’s rights. Without such an acknowledgement, liberty loses all meaning. We wouldn’t know what we are at liberty to do. Finally, as discussed above, the lack of an objective court of appeal leads to the possibility that others may impose their unmoored beliefs on us, given the requisite power to do so. “Pseudo-realities,” as James Lindsay notes in a recent installment of New Discourses, “being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power … ” Totalitarianism depends on the enforcement of false beliefs. Postmodernism admittedly and purposively leaves us no way to adjudicate beliefs. Likewise, postmodernism lends itself to totalitarianism. Michael Rectenwald was a professor of liberal studies at New York University (retired). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------