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Wow, it's gematria on acid ... only ... yeah ... it doesn't work on any level ... just insanity.
It's my job as a copy editor to try to make sense out of what people write, to guess what they intend to convey (the intended sense) from what sometimes is some very winding and twisting language on the page and then (1) assess whether the linguistic expression presently on the page is within the bounds of technical grammar and established conventions, (2) try it on for size reading (really, the first job of an editor is to be a reader) and see if there are any places that, while grammatically all right once you get them, make the reader jump through hoops to get because of poor placement of elements for flow (not just flow for a nice sound, or eloquence, but flow in parsing first-level sense in basic reading, before even getting to second-level sense like whether the argument works or whether the pieces of evidence chosen are relevant, which isn't my job as a copy editor .. although some knowledge of the range of such issues within a filed is helpful for assessing whether the sense will be discernible for the intended audience) or ambiguities from unclear antecedents or unclear grammar that needs the help of surrounding content to decipher (my general maxim is that grammar should reveal content, not vice versa), and (3) suggest edits that resolve any issues of type (1) or type (2). (There is also a tech side to my job of knowing the formatting conventions a publisher uses for citations and adjusting an author's citations to those ... and a tech side of providing Word documents that don't make compositors want to kill me). And I've also studied Judaica. And this sign has no sense beyond "hey there are numbers involved in something we don't like that coincidentally add to a number involved in something that's a current threat right now. But no hint of significance."
There is no proposition of causality. In gematria, a classic beginner-level example (you'll find it referenced in Darren Arnofsky's film Pi) is that, in gematria's assignment of numerical values to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet: alef = 1; bet = 2, daleth = 4, yod = 10; lamed = 30; mem = 40; so, alef + bet = av (father) = 3; alef + mem = im (mother) = 41; yeled (child) = yod + lamed + daleth = 44; both "father + mother" and "child" = 44; father + mother = child. The whole point works on the causal idea of "father + mother = child," the mechanics of which I certainly hope we all know as a real fact in life (the point of gematria is that the language in which The Holy One, Blessed Be He, has given us the Torah contains its truths not just on the level at which we usually do language, but on a secret structural level, an inner core that can be a path that the true student can follow to find deeper hidden meanings that aren't seen on the regular language level of the text, because the Holy One, Blessed Be He, is not limited to using language just in the regular way we use it ... this is a practice in Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and its direct descendant, Hasidic Judaism, of which the Jewish man Lenny who does the gematria example in Arnofsky's Pi is a member). An example of a numbers game that might work in a recent context like this would be: the number of letters in Obama's name (5) and the number of letters in Clinton's name (6) add up to the number of letters in "Islamic State" (12), so Trumps "sarcastic" statement that Obama and Clinton created ISIS (their policies created a void that allowed ISIS space to form and gain ground). It's completely inane, but it is at least a discernible sense.
But there's no such idea in this lady's sign. Is it supposed to be that Obama's policy choices left gateways through which something like this could happen? What are those supposed to be? The sign doesn't have even the inane sense of my little ISIS number game above. All a sign like this is is a bunch of people who really can't think, just get a few basic things like addition, trying to couch their emotional flare-ups in something that looks like things used by people who think .
So, what is my point in this little excursion down analysis lane? Obviously this sign is crackpot and many conservatives still trying to maintain some sense of order while still supporting the party would admit this. But this sign is only the grossly exaggerated form of a very common tendency in conservatism in America. You will hear them use terms like, for instance, "logic" with no real concrete idea of what they mean by it. Really what they mean (although would have difficulty admitting to themselves that they mean) is that they have an emotional need to live up to some project set for them by their parents (or substitutions, if the rebelled against parents and now sail under another's flag, but the basic instinct really always goes back to the attachment to the parent in early development), who taught them to dislike liberals and evolutionists etc, and taught them to value the word "logic" as something held by the superior people, and so they gain a positive emotional experience from hearing themselves apply the designation "not logical" to liberals etc. ... which really has nothing much to do with the kind of thought employed by, say, very nerdy modal logicians who get excited every time they write "iff" (the siglum for "if an only if" ... modal logic is the branch of logic that deals with moods other than the indicative mood, particularly the mood of conditionality, closest to the linguistic mood called the subjunctive, which is best described as the mood of possiblity versus the mood of actuality, the indicative mood). It's obviously not the level of whackadoodle that this woman's sign is, but at its core, it's the same basic phenomenon, which was portrayed rather well in Kate McKinnon's parody of Laura Ingraham as spouting "feel facts," which "aren't actual facts, but just feel true" (like "Latinas can have a baby every three months" and "if you have fewer than five guns, you're probably gay"), and here, the feel is really the same one on which identity marketing and identity politics are based: it makes me feel safe (and not needing to be afraid of the chaos in human life) if I can please the people I view as my emotional protectorates by showing that the people we dislike are substandard (prejudice is always positive in the first instance: hating them is always a means to the end of loving us).
It's my job as a copy editor to try to make sense out of what people write, to guess what they intend to convey (the intended sense) from what sometimes is some very winding and twisting language on the page and then (1) assess whether the linguistic expression presently on the page is within the bounds of technical grammar and established conventions, (2) try it on for size reading (really, the first job of an editor is to be a reader) and see if there are any places that, while grammatically all right once you get them, make the reader jump through hoops to get because of poor placement of elements for flow (not just flow for a nice sound, or eloquence, but flow in parsing first-level sense in basic reading, before even getting to second-level sense like whether the argument works or whether the pieces of evidence chosen are relevant, which isn't my job as a copy editor .. although some knowledge of the range of such issues within a filed is helpful for assessing whether the sense will be discernible for the intended audience) or ambiguities from unclear antecedents or unclear grammar that needs the help of surrounding content to decipher (my general maxim is that grammar should reveal content, not vice versa), and (3) suggest edits that resolve any issues of type (1) or type (2). (There is also a tech side to my job of knowing the formatting conventions a publisher uses for citations and adjusting an author's citations to those ... and a tech side of providing Word documents that don't make compositors want to kill me). And I've also studied Judaica. And this sign has no sense beyond "hey there are numbers involved in something we don't like that coincidentally add to a number involved in something that's a current threat right now. But no hint of significance."
There is no proposition of causality. In gematria, a classic beginner-level example (you'll find it referenced in Darren Arnofsky's film Pi) is that, in gematria's assignment of numerical values to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet: alef = 1; bet = 2, daleth = 4, yod = 10; lamed = 30; mem = 40; so, alef + bet = av (father) = 3; alef + mem = im (mother) = 41; yeled (child) = yod + lamed + daleth = 44; both "father + mother" and "child" = 44; father + mother = child. The whole point works on the causal idea of "father + mother = child," the mechanics of which I certainly hope we all know as a real fact in life (the point of gematria is that the language in which The Holy One, Blessed Be He, has given us the Torah contains its truths not just on the level at which we usually do language, but on a secret structural level, an inner core that can be a path that the true student can follow to find deeper hidden meanings that aren't seen on the regular language level of the text, because the Holy One, Blessed Be He, is not limited to using language just in the regular way we use it ... this is a practice in Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and its direct descendant, Hasidic Judaism, of which the Jewish man Lenny who does the gematria example in Arnofsky's Pi is a member). An example of a numbers game that might work in a recent context like this would be: the number of letters in Obama's name (5) and the number of letters in Clinton's name (6) add up to the number of letters in "Islamic State" (12), so Trumps "sarcastic" statement that Obama and Clinton created ISIS (their policies created a void that allowed ISIS space to form and gain ground). It's completely inane, but it is at least a discernible sense.
But there's no such idea in this lady's sign. Is it supposed to be that Obama's policy choices left gateways through which something like this could happen? What are those supposed to be? The sign doesn't have even the inane sense of my little ISIS number game above. All a sign like this is is a bunch of people who really can't think, just get a few basic things like addition, trying to couch their emotional flare-ups in something that looks like things used by people who think .
So, what is my point in this little excursion down analysis lane? Obviously this sign is crackpot and many conservatives still trying to maintain some sense of order while still supporting the party would admit this. But this sign is only the grossly exaggerated form of a very common tendency in conservatism in America. You will hear them use terms like, for instance, "logic" with no real concrete idea of what they mean by it. Really what they mean (although would have difficulty admitting to themselves that they mean) is that they have an emotional need to live up to some project set for them by their parents (or substitutions, if the rebelled against parents and now sail under another's flag, but the basic instinct really always goes back to the attachment to the parent in early development), who taught them to dislike liberals and evolutionists etc, and taught them to value the word "logic" as something held by the superior people, and so they gain a positive emotional experience from hearing themselves apply the designation "not logical" to liberals etc. ... which really has nothing much to do with the kind of thought employed by, say, very nerdy modal logicians who get excited every time they write "iff" (the siglum for "if an only if" ... modal logic is the branch of logic that deals with moods other than the indicative mood, particularly the mood of conditionality, closest to the linguistic mood called the subjunctive, which is best described as the mood of possiblity versus the mood of actuality, the indicative mood). It's obviously not the level of whackadoodle that this woman's sign is, but at its core, it's the same basic phenomenon, which was portrayed rather well in Kate McKinnon's parody of Laura Ingraham as spouting "feel facts," which "aren't actual facts, but just feel true" (like "Latinas can have a baby every three months" and "if you have fewer than five guns, you're probably gay"), and here, the feel is really the same one on which identity marketing and identity politics are based: it makes me feel safe (and not needing to be afraid of the chaos in human life) if I can please the people I view as my emotional protectorates by showing that the people we dislike are substandard (prejudice is always positive in the first instance: hating them is always a means to the end of loving us).
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