Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Here.

"Donald Trump is crazy!" = "Donald Trump drives me crazy!"

To the editor:

Jonah Goldberg’s latest column comes off as an attempt to normalize President Trump, who he writes personifies the trends that have been in place for some time among voters. (“Don't blame it on the Orb: American institutional failure is the source of our weirdness,” Jan. 2)

Are serial lying, bullying, the debasing of women and gays, racism, white nationalism and ignorance of facts, history and our system of government all trends in the making over the last few decades? In the United States writ large?

No, but perhaps Goldberg only sees where he sits, as indeed Trump is the personification of these debasing trends in the Republican Party. In this column, Goldberg fails to see how these trends are leading to the destruction of his party.

Mark Chipman, San Diego

Thank you to the great Republican Senators who showed up to our mtg on immigration reform. We must BUILD THE WALL, stop illegal immigration, end chain migration & cancel the visa lottery. The current system is unsafe & unfair to the great people of our country – time for change!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2018

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Writers with a reputation for clarity are often complimented in terms that locate the virtue in the wrong place. ‘Delightfully clear sentences’ is usually the theme, and there are many variations on it. What they show is that clarity is taken to be first and foremost a property of the sentences. This is a mistake: clarity is first and foremost a property of structure. Just as the architectural design of a building does not inhere in the bricks, and might remain the same if the whole building were constructed of other materials, so the chief repository of clarity in a verbal communication is a structure that can remain the same when all the words and all the sentences are different, as they are in a translation. Needless to say, it is nevertheless important to have clear sentences, just as it is important to have sound bricks and strong walls.

Not only does a reader need to be clear in his mind about what is under discussion at every given moment, he needs to understand why it is being discussed. How did he get to this point? What steps were gone through to bring him here in such a way that the question now reached seems to have arisen naturally? And what expectations does this suggest about the next step, or choice of steps? Only if a reader is clear about these things too does he really know where he is. And they are matters of order. Structure is of the essence.

Some philosophers, most importantly Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, lay out a structure like this with the utmost clarity, yet in unclear sentences. In his case it was because he had spent many years thinking his critical philosophy through, but then wrote it down hurriedly because he was afraid of dying before he finished writing the book. The result is clear thinking expressed in unclear sentences.

(Bryan Magee, "Clarity in Philosophy," Philosophy 89 [July 2014]: 451-62, at 451 [italics in original])

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Here is Scott Adams's latest blog post.

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