That our diplomat’s first impulse is to resort to a self-defeating meme speaks to a broader problem—the sort of cultural problem instinctual reactions to crisis make most clear. This is a problem of an entire generation—my generation. We are a people that retweets when we could be reading. The minds of best and our brightest have been poisoned by ratios, “god tweets,” and memes. We came of age on Twitter, Tumblr, and 4chan, and still see the world through their frames. We find it harder and harder to distinguish the actual from the image; we struggle to disentangle perception management from problem management. This is what it looks like when the terminally online ascend to positions of real responsibility. Welcome to the age of shitpost diplomacy.
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.
In fact what solipsism means is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself.
That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of that language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.
I am my world. (The microcosm.)
The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.
Propositions cannot express anything higher.
It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.