Reflections, Reflections

Sweet.

This is exactly what our professor tried teaching us today:

Who says 2 is just 2, right? Wrong. My experience with 2 is not necessarily yours, and so your 2 may be greater than my 2, specially because in this strict two-normative world, larger-value twos are oppressed by the hegemonic concept of just plain two. The most profound contribution of liberals' critique of semioticist postcapitalist two theory is the difference between society and reality.

We know real 2 is unattainable; however, it is not so much the reality of 2 that is unattainable, but rather the collapse, and some would say the meaninglessness, of this 2. We simply can't know anything about 2. 2 is contextualised into a neotextual semanticist frame that includes truth as a totality. But Derrida brilliantly and astutely uses the term 'the subdialectic paradigm of logic' to denote the sameness between 2 and other-twoness. Swinish multitudes and other rabble who cannot experience the alterity of 2, and to comprehend that 2 is NOT 2, are still locked into that doltish irrationality of a deplorable neostructuralist religious nihilism. A similar example can be found with what the meaning of "is" is, heavily discussed in the media by another great liberal philosopher a few years ago.

For example, nowhere in the Bible does it say that two was meant to be simply two. Where it said 2 was 1+1, as when Noah joined and took two of each animals, one male, one female, it could have been 1 or 3 or even 4 sexes, in extremely large 2 cases. Similarly, some twos are dazed and confused, they don't know if they are ones or threes, and to try to help them sort it out is just unethical. To be dazed and confused is to know. The confused subject should not be interpolated into a textual paradigm of reality that includes meaning as a profound component of reality. That would be absurd, it would be like saying 2 equals 2, when we all know 2 does not equal 2 (usually). Thanks to several recent philosophical breakthroughs, we can simultaneously attain absolute truth and relative meaninglessness in post-modernity.

We now know that for a large 2, 2+2 equals more than 4 but not exactly 5. 2+2 only equals 5 for extremely large values of 2, you see. It's therefore wrong to impose your twos on other twos, since postmodernism wisely proved that all values for two are valid, that's what differentiates 2 from from 3 because for large values of 2, 2 is 3. This is the only reality. Additionally, if you don't believe 2+2=5, you're just a stupid, hate-filled bigot, that's why we will make you believe 2+2 is not 4. And until we have every teacher in every state teaching each child that 2+2=5, there'll be no freedom.

What was our teacher's name? Prof. Winston.



(I wrote the above with a little vocab inspiration from this. Saw the t-shirt at Ace´s blog. If you had trouble reading the finer print on the t-shirt, it says, "2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2". I have 2 (yes, two!) idiots as professors who teach the above.)

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update March 22-2005

Jack, ahem Dr. Perry, who is a mathematician, commented:

I quit reading very quickly.

I thought for a second: what about different groups? This has to deal with advanced mathematics; in some "groups" 2+2 is usually written 0 or 1. That doesn't mean that 2+2 doesn't equal 4; it just means that we write it differently based on equivalence classes. This is actually a useful tool for lots of things; for example, it's how the credit card companies make sure a number doesn't get mixed up in transmission (for example). If you think of clock arithmetic (11+1=0) it might make sense.

Even with that, however, I can't think of a situation where 2+2=5.
jack perry

What?! You still haven't learned that 2+2=5?

I think I'll have to write your PhD committee and say you shouldn't have passed your defense :-) Your problem is that you are using logic and mathematics to look at the 2+2=5 statement. tsk, tsk.

The day liberal social science professors take over your department and your field, 2 will be any thing they wish it to be, that is, whatever meaning they assign it to feel better about their own hang-ups. This is what constitutes the absolute truth for liberals. Your job is just to nod and say, "Everything is relative except for the fact of how right you are, that is not relative. They wouldn't hire an idiot to teach us, would they?"

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