Category: Language Matters

For a ‘Liberal,’ Gun Control = Gun Confiscation

Suppose there occurs some horrendous incident of roadway carnage. Nobody says, 'We need traffic laws.'  Nobody competent in English says that because it conversationally implies that there are no traffic laws.  What a person might sensibly say is that we need additional traffic laws, for example, laws outlawing texting while driving.  

So why do liberals reliably say, whenever there is a school shooting, or a similar outrage, 'We need gun control'? 'Gun control' refers to gun control laws of which there are many at the Federal, State, and local levels. Why would a liberal say we need gun control when it is obvious that there is plenty of gun control?

Because, for a 'liberal,' 'gun control is code for 'gun confiscation.' It is just that they, or most of them, lack the intellectual honesty to state plainly what they are for.

One of the reasons Hillary lost to the unlikely Donald Trump is because of her mendacity on this very issue. A stealth ideologue to the core, her speeches were nothing but bromides, blather, and bushwa bereft of ideas and concrete proposals. She dared not say what she really had in mind in prosecution of Obama's destructive project of "fundamental transformation." Luckily, the Clinton dynasty is at an end as is the Bush dynasty. We can thank Trump for having put paid to both.

Will the ‘Collusionistas’ Now Apologize to Donald Trump?

Fat chance.

Being a leftist means never having to say you're sorry. Did the Left ever apologize for its support of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin? Did they ever admit that the Rosenbergs were, in 'fifties parlance, 'atomic spies' for the Soviet Union? My astute readers are equipped to supply further examples.

The Mueller indictment finds no wrongdoing by Trump or members of his administration:

Despite a 37-page indictment with a long narrative on a coordinated Russian campaign of interference, the most newsworthy fact comes from the carefully placed adjective “unwitting.” It confirms that the special counsel has found no knowing coordination or collusion between these hackers and Trump officials. 

Leftists will not admit that they were wrong. What I expect them to do is to change the subject without making any admission that they have changed the subject.

They will shift from the charge that Trump and Co. colluded with the Russians to swing the election in his favor to the entirely different charge that Putin and the boys tried to interfere with the internal politics of the USA.  

The attempt by the Left to smear Trump stank from the very beginning. Many of us asked an obvious question at the outset, a question to which no good answer was ever given: Why on earth would Putin want the alpha male Donald Trump in office rather than the feckless Hillary?  And given that all the pollsters were predicting that Trump would be crushed, why would Putin think he had any chance of aiding Trump?

Another thing some of us noted right at the beginning was the use of the meaningless phrase, 'hack the election.'  You can hack into an e-mail account, but how do you hack an election?  It makes no bloody sense unless you inflate the phrase to mean 'influence the election.' But then every political blogger, every commentator, and indeed every voter was attempting to 'hack the election.'

Language matters.

Fake News: 18 School Shootings Since January 1, 2018. The Importance of Definition

The question of how many school shootings have occurred in a given place over a given period of time is an empirical question. But to answer the empirical question, one must first have answered a logically prior question, which is non-empirical. This is the conceptual question as to the definition of 'school shooting.' 

What counts as a school shooting? The supervised, safe, Saturday morning on-campus firing of BB guns at targets? The 'discharge' of a pea shooter? The shotgunning of ducks in  a pond on a school's grounds?  The killing of a stray deer with bow and arrow?

Suppose some punk fires a .223 round at a window of a school in the middle of the night when no one is there from an off-campus position. That could be called a school shooting too. A physical part of the school was shot at.

Or let us say that a distraught person commits suicide by shooting himself while seated in a car parked in a lot of what was formerly a school. This is an a actual case that was cited as a 'school shooting'! See linked article infra. Does this count as a school shooting? Not to someone who is intellectually honest.  

Clearly, what most people mean by a school shooting is an attempted mass shooting in a school or on the premises of a school by one or more assailants armed with deadly weapons, a shooting of students or teachers or administrative personnel that causes death or injury.

That definition no doubt needs tweaking, but if we adopt something like it, then, since January 1st we have in these United States more like three, count 'em, three school shootings. Three too many, but even a liberal gun-grabber knows that 3 < 18. 

Across the board, lying leftists bandy about terms without explicit definitions, or with over-broad definitions. They do this willfully to further their destructive agendas. If you are a decent human being you will do your bit to oppose them.

Now go read the Politifact article.

Of Black Holes and Political Correctness: If You Take Offense, Is that My Fault?

Black hole NASASuppose a white person uses the phrase 'black hole' in the presence of a black person either in its literal cosmological meaning or in some objectively inoffensive metaphorical sense, and the black person takes offense and complains that the phrase is 'racially insensitive.' Actual case here. Compare that with a case in which a white person uses 'nigger' in the presence of a black person.

I have just marked out two ends of a semantic spectrum. 'Black hole' used either literally or in some not-too-loose analogy to the literal meaning — as in 'black hole' used to refer to a windowless office — cannot be taken by any rational person as a racial slur. For 'black' in 'black hole' has nothing to do with race. But 'nigger' used by a white person is a racial slur.

It is worth noting that I did not use 'nigger' in the immediately preceding sentence: I mentioned it. It is a standard distinction and an important one if you value clarity of thought.

Use, Mention, ‘Quotation’ Marks, and Political Correctness

The title of a recent Weekly Standard article reads:

Professor Uses 'N-Word,' Student Shouts 'F-You,' 'Free Speech' Class Canceled at Princeton.

I would write it like this:

Professor mentions N-word [no inverted commas], Student Shouts 'F-You,' [correct use of inverted commas for quotation], 'Free Speech' Class Cancelled at Princeton [correct use of inverted commas as sneer quotes].

Pedantry aside, the real problem is in the following paragraph:

Last week Prof. Rosen received national attention for using the N-word in this class on freedom of expression. Some students walked out and protested the term’s use. One report, cited in Princeton’s main campus newspaper, says that Rosen asked, “What is worse, a white man punching a black man, or a white man calling a black man a n****r?” And when Rosen was met with disagreement of his use of the N-word, and on his continued use of the term in the academic setting, he said, he would use it, “if I think it’s necessary.”

Rosen didn't use the N-word, he mentioned it.  Rosen was talking about the word 'nigger' and asking whether it would be worse for a white man to punch a black man or to apply the word 'nigger' to him. That is a perfectly legitimate question and there is nothing racist about it.

There is also nothing racist about my mentioning of the word in question in the second-to-last sentence.  I am talking about the word in the way I would be talking about it were I to say that it is disyllabic and consists of six letters.  I am not applying it to anyone. 

Which is worse, to punch a Jew (without provocation) or to apply 'kike' to him? Does it make one an anti-Semite to ask this question? Obviously not.

Read the rest to fully savor how the Left has destroyed the universities.  If you are thinking of an academic career in a non-STEM field you may want to think twice. 

Democrats Undermine the Foundations of Rational Discourse

Rational discourse requires observance of a few simple procedural rules. One of the most basic is to use words and phrases in their commonly accepted senses and to refrain from distorting them for partisan purposes.  Take 'chain migration.' According to Wikipedia, a usually reliable source, 

Chain migration is a term used by demographers since the 1960s[1] to refer to the social process by which migrants from a particular town follow others from that town to a particular destination city or neighborhood. The destination may be in another country or in a new, usually urban, location within the same country.

Chain migration can be defined as a “movement in which prospective migrants learn of opportunities, are provided with transportation, and have initial accommodation and employment arranged by means of primary social relationships with previous migrants.”[1] Or, more simply put: "The dynamic underlying 'chain migration' is so simple that it sounds like common sense: People are more likely to move to where people they know live, and each new immigrant makes people they know more likely to move there in turn."

As you can see, 'chain migration' is a phrase that has been in use for a long time. It is no more a racist slur than 'black hole' is.  Why then does Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D NY) say it is?  You know the answer.

Jonah Goldberg:

A more recent example comes in the novel claim that the term “chain migration” is a racist shibboleth. Chain migration is — or was — an utterly neutral term for the process by which legal immigrants sponsor members of their extended family to become citizens as well.

Rep Chris Murphy, D-Conn., tweeted recently, “Reminder: ‘chain migration’ is a made-up term by the hard-line anti-immigration crowd. Its purpose is to dehumanize immigrants. If you're using that word, you're declaring a side.”

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., refuses to even use the phrase. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., insists the term — which he used as recently as 2010 — is offensive because African Americans came here in chains. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, insists that " 'chain migration' is an epithet. It was invented. The term is ‘family immigration,’ and it’s the way America has literally always worked.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., made a figurative clown of herself when she literally said, “Let's be very clear: When someone uses the phrase 'chain migration,' it is intentional in trying to demonize families, literally trying to demonize families and make it a racist slur.”

This is just more evidence that our political opponents are not fellow citizens with whom we can have productive discussions. They are domestic enemies and we are in a war. You may not want to accept that. I didn't for a long time. But the fact is now unblinkable.

Don't imagine that you can reason with them. They will ignore what you say and go right back to the recitation of their defamatory litany: racist, white supremacist, xenophobe, . . . . You need to disembarrass yourself of the notion that they are basically decent people. They are not. 

“But that’s not Who We are!”

Well, who are we then?  That piece of liberal misdirection and obfuscation, the vacuous phrase, 'Who we are,' is in need of sober critique. Paul Gottfried provides it. Here is a chunk of his text:

It seems statements can only contradict “who we are” if they’re expressed past the point in time that the media decided they were no longer allowed. So President Clinton was not being homophobic when he pushed successfully for the Defense of Marriage Act. That’s because he did that in 1996, before gay marriage became an integral part of “who we are.” And Richard Durbin was not being un-American when he called for ending “chain migration” on the floor of the Senate in 2010, since the Left had not yet made the term and the policy it refers to incompatible with “who we are.” Durbin would later go after President Trump for using that exact same expression because it offends black citizens whose ancestors “were brought here in chains.” Ditto when the very liberal Senator Edward Kennedy assured critics of the 1965 immigration reform bill that the legislation would not “upset the ethnic mix” in the United States and would “not inundate America with immigrants from…the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia.” Back then, the left could say such things without being in violation of “who we are.” That’s because it was not yet going after Donald Trump.

I would add that when such stealth ideologues as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Obama, Durbin and the rest seemed to have changed their views, that was not what was really going on. They were leftists all along. They merely mouthed sane positions on marriage and immigration because it was politically advantageous for them to do so at the time.

Age Quod Agis

DocHollidayAge quod agis is a well-known saying which is a sort of Latin call to mindfulness: do what you are doing. Be here now in the activity at hand.

Legend has it that Johnny Ringo was an educated man.  (Not so: a story for later.) But so he is depicted over and over. In this scene from Tombstone, the best of the movies about Doc Holliday and the shoot-out at the O. K. Corral, Ringo trades Latinisms with the gun-totin' dentist, who was indeed an educated man and a fearless and deadly gunslinger to boot, his fearlessness a function of his 'consumption.'

I don't mean his consumption of spirits, but his tuberculosis. His was the courage of an embittered man, close to death.

The translations in the video clip leave something to be desired. Age quod agis gets translated as 'do what you do best'; the literal meaning, however, is do what you are doing. Age is in the imperative mood; quod is 'what'; agis is the second person singular present tense of agere and means: 'you do' or 'you are doing.'

Curiously, Doc Holliday did not die with his boots on. He died in bed.

Related articles
Maverick Philosopher: Latin Versus Italian: Differences

Word of the Day: Conurbation

"An extended urban area, typically consisting of several towns merging with the suburbs of one or more cities." See here.

You weren't taught Latin in high school? Then you were cheated by 'progressive' idiots. But if you were taught, then you know that the Latin  for 'city' is urbs, urbis. Knowing this, you are in a position reasonably to guess the meaning of our word of the day. And knowing a little Latin, you will be helped in your understanding of 'suburban' and 'urbane' and 'urbicide.' 

Example:

By the mid-1960s, the character of the region was changing rapidly. A carpet of housing subdivisions, shopping malls, parking lots, freeways, and gas stations was being rolled out from LA. Soon the orange groves and bean fields disappeared, and Orange County became one vast undifferentiated conurbation. It was difficult to tell when you left one town and entered another. 

By the way, the author, the philosopher Lee Hardy, is a good writer as witness his "mid-1960s," with no apostrophe. But an apostrophe is needed in the following: 'mid-'60s.' I also invite you to notice that when I am quoting someone I use double quotation marks, but when I am mentioning an expression, or using an expression in an extended sense, I use single quotation marks. I warmly recommend my conventions inasmuch as they are eminently rational. But you are free to disagree without fear of being shot.

Long before I became a Phoenician, I was a Los Angeleno. So I know something about conurbation. Luckily, I live at the far Eastern edge of the Phoenix metropolitan region, right up against the Superstition Wilderness where conubation hereabouts stops, Gott sei dank.

As that great American Henry David Thoreau once said, in the pages of The Atlantic (June 1862) when that magazine was worth reading, in his essay "Walking," 

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Again and again, people who cannot read what is on the page substitute 'wilderness' for 'wildness.' People see what they want to see, or expect to see. Here is an example of double butchery I found recently:

In wilderness is the preservation of Mankind.

(Warren Macdonald, A Test of Will, Greystone Books, 2004, p. 145.) 

Of ‘Whither’ and ‘Whence’

I had a teacher in the fifth grade who, when one of us inappropriately wandered off, would query, "Whither goest thou?" alluding, as I did not realize at the time, to the Gospel of John (13:36):

Simon Peter said unto him, Lord, whither goest thou? Jesus answered him, Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.

'Whither' means to where just as 'whence' mean from where. (Please avoid the pleonasm of 'from whence.') The distinction is obliterated by the promiscuous use of 'where' for both. That cannot be good from a logical point of view. It is therefore right and fitting and conducive unto clarity that my favorite antediluvian curmudgeon, the Laudator Temporis Acti, should complain:

The use of whither is withering away in English, alas, just like whence, although both words usefully distinguish notions that we now force where alone to bear, e.g. in the New International Version of John 13.36:

Simon Peter asked him, "Lord, where are you going?" Jesus replied, "Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later."

A Linguistic Curiosity

Such words as 'poetess' and 'actress' are falling into disuse: the grammatically masculine 'poet' and 'actor' are now used gender-neutrally for both sexes. Why then the stink over the gender-neutral use of 'he' to cover both males and females as in such sentences as in 'He who hesitates is lost'?  If there is no objection to applying grammatically masculine nouns to females, why the objection to applying the grammatically masculine pronoun 'he' to females? 

God, Pronouns, and Anthropomorphism

I was delighted to hear from an old student of mine from 35 years ago. He writes,

In your writings, you often refer to God in pronouns bearing gender.  Does such language result in God’s anthropomorphism?

I would reformulate the question as follows:

In your writings, whenever you refer to God using a third-person pronoun, you use the masculine pronoun 'he.' Does this use of 'he' promote an anthropomorphic conception of God?

I would say No. It is true that the pronoun I use in reference to God is 'he.' And because I write almost always as a philosopher, I do not write upper-case 'He' in reference to God except at the beginning of a sentence. This is not a sign of disrespect; it arises from a desire not to mix the strictly philosophical with the pious.

Does a use of 'he' in reference to God imply that God is of the male sex? Not at all. Otherwise one would have to say that a use of 'she' in reference to a ships and airplanes implies that these things  are of the female sex.  But ships and airplances, being inanimate material objects, are of no sex.*

God too is of no sex, but for a different reason: he is wholly immaterial.  (I will suggest a qualification below.) Still, we need to be able to refer to God. Assuming we don't want to keep repeating 'God,' we need pronouns. 'It' is out. 'He or she' makes no sense. Why not then use 'he'? Note that any argument against 'he' would also work against 'she.' 

As a conservative, I of course oppose silly and unnecessary innovations; so I use 'he' to refer to God.  For a conservative, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional practices: the burden of proof is on the innovator.

One must distinguish between grammatical gender, which is a property of words, and sex which is a property of some referents of words.  As already noted, if one uses 'she' to refer to something it doesn't follow that the thing referred to is female. That shows that grammatical gender and sex come apart.  One ought to bear in mind that gender is first and foremost a grammatical category. Sex is a biological category.  I have no objection to talk of gender roles as (in part) socio-cultural constructs, which involves an extended use of 'gender.' 

That grammatical gender and sex come apart  is also the case with nouns. In English, the nouns 'table' and 'boat' have no gender, but in Italian (and other languages such as German) their counterparts do: tavolo is masculine while barca is feminine. This is reflected in the difference between the appropriate definite articles, il and la, where in English we have the gender-neutral 'the.'   But while tavolo and barca are masculine and feminine respectively, their referents are sexless.  So again grammatical gender and sex come apart.

So when I use 'he' in reference to God there is no implication that God is of the male sex.

It is also worth pointing out that an anthropomorphic conception of God is not a concept of God as a male, but as a human being. So if I use 'he' in reference to God am I implying that God is  a human being?  No. But he is more like a human being than he is like any other type of animal or any inanimate object. So 'he' is an appropriate pronoun to use.

But why 'he' rather than 'she'? 

Recall that when his disciples asked Jesus how they should pray, he taught them the "Our Father." Was Jesus suggesting that we are all the biological offspring of God? Of course not. Still, he used 'Father' or the equivalent in Aramaic.

Is there a hint of sexism here? If there is, it would seem to be mitigated By God's having a mother, the Virgin Mary: Sancte Maria, mater dei . . . . Mary is not merely the mother of Jesus, but the mother of God:

According to St. John (1:15) Jesus is the Word made flesh, the Word Who assumed human nature in the womb of Mary. As Mary was truly the mother of Jesus, and as Jesus was truly God from the first moment of His conception, Mary is truly the mother of God. (here)

This divine motherhood does not elevate Mary above God, for she remains a creature, even after her Assumption into heaven. She is not worshipped or adored (latria) but she is due a special sort of veneration called hyperdulia, dulia being the name for the veneration appropriate to saints.  Or at least that is the Catholic doctrine.

Is God Immaterial?

There is another curious theological wrinkle. Christ is supposed to have ascended into heaven body and soul. The Ascension was therefore not a process of de-materialization or disembodiment. Christ returned to the Godhead body and soul. The Ascension did not undo the Incarnation: returning to the Godhead, Christ did not become disincarnate. After the Word (Logos, Second Person of the Trinity) became flesh and dwelt among us it remained flesh even after it ceased to dwell among us.

This seems to imply that after the Ascension  matter was imported into the Godhead, perhaps not the gross matter of the sublunary plane, but matter nonetheless.  But not only that: the matter imported into the Godhead, even if appropriately transfigured or spiritualized, was the matter of a male animal. For Jesus was male.  

So while we tend to think of God and the Persons of the Trinity as wholly immaterial and sexless when we prescind from the Incarnation and Ascension, God after these events includes a material and indeed sexually male element. This is a further reason to think that 'he' is an appropriate pronoun to apply to God.

But what if God is Being Itself?

According to Aquinas, Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. God is self-subsistent Being. He is not an ens among entia but esse itself. He is Being itself in its primary instance.

Is it appropriate to refer to such a metaphysical absolute as 'he'? Not entirely, but 'he' is better than any other pronoun I can think of.  Of course, one could coin a pronoun for use only in reference to God, say 'de.' But as I said, conservatives are chary of innovations, especially when they are unnecessary. Just use 'he' but realize what you are doing. 

___________________

* Is 'he' ever used to refer to what is not a male animal? I should think so.  Suppose a man gives his primary male characteristic the name 'Max.' He may go on to say: 'Old Max ain't what he used to be.'  This use of 'he' refers to the penis of a human being which is a proper part of a male human being. But I should think that no proper part of a human being is a human being. 

Word of the Day: Camarilla

cam·a·ril·la
ˌkaməˈrilə,-ˈrēə/
noun
noun: camarilla; plural noun: camarillas
  1. a small group of people, especially a group of advisers to a ruler or politician, with a shared, typically nefarious, purpose.
    "a military camarilla that has lost any sense of political reality"
Origin
mid 19th century: from Spanish, diminutive of camara ‘chamber.’