Readers React: Just because your political view is tolerated doesn’t mean it’s based on reality
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To the editor: K.C. Cole’s laudable effort to encourage tolerance of opposing views by comparing it to wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics is undermined by the brute reality that not all frames of reference are equally valid.
To advocate for the embrace of several frames of reference does not serve to establish the truth or falsity of the given proposition. On the contrary, such a simplistic practice might establish a false equivalence between a logically correct analysis supported by evidence and an irrational, factually unsupported assertion.
Under this subjective scheme, everybody’s entitled to their own facts, no one ever holds a wrong opinion and the existence of an objective truth is irrelevant. Regrettably, we’ve seen evidence of this in the egregious dissembling of our political leaders.
With respect to her flawed physics analogy, Cole confuses reality — what is really the case, or the observed physical phenomena — with the causal interpretation of that reality. The former is not subject to falsification, and the latter is.
Andrew Spathis, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Cole is certainly on to something with multiple truths. However, the word “truth” is loaded. “Two plus two equals four” is a truth. I prefer to view our current politics in terms of rationality.
For example, the Jews are totally rational to defend the right of Israel to exist. By the same token, the Palestinians view the founding of Israel as a catastrophe, and their demands for a “right of return” may be unrealistic, but they are rational.
All intractable problems, such as abortion, homelessness and immigration, can be analyzed similarly.
As the secret life of plants becomes less secret, I wonder if the totally rational PETA will morph into PETP, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants, and we will all be shamed into eating only manufactured food.
David Wilczynski, Manhattan Beach
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