Today after reading a BBC article entitled „Could Trump launch ’sneak attack‘ on IS?“ which evaluated Donald Trump’s Sunday night debate claim the American military is „stupid“ for announcing a pending attack on the IS-held city of Mosul, I sat and pondered the reality that neither the BBC nor any of the debate viewers have any reason to believe Trump has any expertise whatsoever in military affairs. Trump may or may not be a successful real estate tycoon. His large real estate holdings and multiple bankruptcies certainly validate attempts to assess his business acumen, but his utterances on foreign policy lack coherence let alone insight. How is it the American people are bothering to pay any attention at all to the man’s statements?
I’m reading Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Enlightenment, on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers. It occurs to me my countrymen are failing to practice basic analytic principles I remember being taught in junior high school. What would Descartes say? Leibniz? What might a twenty-first century Enlightenment look like?