Jasin wrote on Mar 24
th, 2026 at 7:36pm:
Your first two words.
You're a French Poof intellectual snob.
If you're going to accuse me of being an intellectual snob, why not lean into it?
The point, which you've quite deliberately sidestepped in favour of cheap personal attacks, is straightforward: you are absolutely entitled to your perceptions, to your interpretations, to whatever grand narrative you construct from what you think you're observing. That's not in dispute.
Where you come unstuck is in pretending that your perception is synonymous with reality itself. It isn't. Reality exists independent of you, whether you grasp it or not, and conflating the two is a fundamental category error.
This is the dividing line between a scientific outlook and a purely philosophical indulgence. Science exists precisely because human perception is limited, biased, and often wrong, so it builds methods to test, falsify, and correct those perceptions against an external reality.
Take a simple example. From sea level, with the naked eye, the Earth can appear flat depending on visibility. Fine, grant that premise. From your limited observational standpoint, that may well be how it presents.
But does that make the Earth flat?
To you, perhaps. In reality, demonstrably not.
And this is exactly where your thinking consistently collapses, particularly in your politics. You elevate your selective observations to the status of fact, filter out anything that challenges them, and then point back to your own constructed view as "evidence" that you were right all along. It's not analysis, it's a closed feedback loop, a self-reinforcing system designed to protect your beliefs from scrutiny.
So it's hardly surprising you struggle with this distinction here as well.