Yet another example. (HT: Karl White) "University students demand philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are white."
The Telegraph title isn't even grammatical. The stupid demand is that these greats BE removed. Has England declined so far that its journalists can no longer write or speak correct English and must take instruction from an American blogger?
Demands refer to future events. I can demand that you leave my house, but I can't demand that you not have entered it, or that you are leaving it. I could of course demand that you continue the process of removing your sorry ass from my premises, but that too is a future-oriented demand.
I demand that you are stopping to be a willfully stupid leftist and that you are removed from my presence!
UPDATE (1/10). Horace Jeffery Hodges comments,
I think the statement is British English:
"University students demand philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are white."
American English requires a subjunctive form:
I demand that they be removed . . .
This is one of the things I dislike about British grammar.
I don't know. I may be wrong, and Jeff may be right. In any case, it makes no bloody sense to use the present tense to refer to a future event. It is in the nature of a demand that it point us to the future for its satisfaction or the opposite. There is more to grammar than usage; there is also logic broadly construed. But then I am something of a prescriptivist. The distinction between singular and plural, for example, is logical and good grammar respects it.
Correct: A polite chess player thanks his opponent for the game, whether he wins or loses.
Incorrect: A polite chess player thanks their opponent for the game, whether they win or lose.
What about this: A polite chess player thanks her opponent for the game, whether she wins or loses.
I argued years ago that if 'his' can be correctly used gender-neutrally, then so can 'her.' And this despite the fact that in 'standard English usage' (admittedly a tendentious phrase) 'his' but not 'her' can be so used. Lydia McGrew got her knickers in a knot over this, thinking that I had succumbed to political correctness. This goes to show that for some conservatives one can never be too conservative. The least little concession to liberals shows that one has 'sold out.'
But more important than quibbling over language is defeating the Left and the contemptible shitheads who would remove Plato and Kant from the curriculum.
What these cranially-feculent morons fail to grasp is that really to understand their own crack-brained POMO ideology, they would have to study Kant. Kant's defensible constructivism was part of the set-up for their indefensible constructivism. Besides, you need Kant to understand Hegel, and Hegel Marx, and Marx the Frankfurt School . . . .
Most people have pitifully limited vocabularies. It is due to laziness in most cases. Don't pass over words you don't know. Write them down. Look them up. Compile lists. Review the lists.
If you are tired of 'conscious' and desire a stylistic variant, you may use 'conscient,' though it is a term that has fallen into desuetude. "They will make way for the unrepentant barbaric hordes of those who were conditioned throughout their conscient lives to believe that their time would never come." (Conrad Black)
An enjoyable way to resist change-for-the-sake-of-change 'progressive' knuckleheads is to resurrect and use obsolete words.
Malcolm Pollack goes Dennis Prager one better. BRIXISH is indeed superior to SIXHIRB for Malcolm's reasons below, but also because it is in the vicinity of BREXIT. After all, the BRIXISH would tend to support BREXIT. Here's Malcolm:
Saw an unfamiliar acronym over at Maverick Philosopher the the other day: “SIXHIRB”. I had to look it up. It’s a coinage of Dennis Prager’s, and it stands for Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, Bigoted: the “basket” of cudgels routinely applied to anyone to the right of the Vox editorial staff.
I’d have preferred “BRIXISH”: it sounds more like an adjective, and carries a faint echo of America’s founding people and culture (i.e., the usual target). But it’s still handy to have a linguistic shortcut for these reflexive and ubiquitous slurs, so here’s a nod to Mr. Prager.
I am slightly surprised that Malcolm did not instantly recognize the Pragerian provenience of SIXHIRB inasmuch as every other time I have used it I have credited Prager. I didn't this time to save keystrokes, figuring that everyone knew by now that it is Prager's coinage.
An acronym is a pronounceable word formed from either the initial letters of two or more words, or from contiguous letters of two or more words. For example, 'laser' is a pronounceable word formed from the initial letters of the following words: light, amplification, stimulated, emission, radiation. And Gestapo is a pronounceable word formed from contiguous letters of the following words: geheime, Staats, Polizei.
But what about BREXIT? It is not an initialism or a truncation as I define these terms:
An initialism is a string of contiguous letters, unpronounceable as a word or else not in use as a word, but pronounceable as a list of letters, formed from the initial letters of two or more words. For example, 'PBS' is an initialism that abbreviates 'Public Broadcasting System.' 'PBS' cannot be pronounced as a word, but it can be pronounced as a series of letters: Pee, Bee, Ess. 'IT' is an initialism that abbreviates "information technology.' In this case 'IT' is pronounceable as a word, but is not in use as a word. You can say, 'Mary works in Eye-Tee,' but not, 'Mary works in IT.' The same goes for 'ASU' which abbreviates 'Arizona State University.'
A truncation is a term formed from a single word by shortening it. 'App,' for example is a truncation of 'application,' and 'ho' is presumably a truncation of 'whore' (in black idiom). 'Auto' is a truncation of 'automobile,' and 'blog' (noun) of 'weblog.'
So I book BREXIT under acronym despite its difference from the other two. BREXIT fits my definition of 'acronym' inasmuch as it is a pronounceable word formed from contiguous letters of two or more words, in this case, 'Britain' and 'exit.' The fact that all of the letters of 'exit' are packed into BREXIT does not stop the latter from being an acronym.
I just found this sentence at Puffington Host: "He is so insecure, he will broach no criticism." You may easily guess whom the author is huffing and puffing over.
But one does not broach no criticism; one brooks no criticism.
'Post-truth' is a silly buzz word, and therefore beloved by journalists who typically talk and write uncritically in trendy ways. There is no way to get beyond truth or to live after truth. All of our intellectual operations are conducted under the aegis of truth.
Here is one example of how we presuppose truth. People routinely accuse each other of lying, and often the accusations are just. But to lie is to make a false statement with the intention of deceiving one's audience. A false statement is one that is not true. It follows that if there is no truth, then there are no lies. If we are beyond truth, then we are beyond lies as well. But of course lies are told, so truth exists.
I could squeeze a lot of philosophical juice out of this topic, and you hope I won't. I will content myself with some mundane observations.
'Post-truth' is used mainly to describe contemporary politics. The idea is that it does not much matter in the political sphere whether what is said is true so long as it is effective in swaying people this way or that. What is persuasive need not be true, and what is true need not be persuasive. But this has has always been the case, so why the need for 'post-truth'? Is it really so much worse these days?
For the Left, Donald Trump is the prime post-truther, the post-truth poster boy if you will, the prima Donald of the practice of post-truth. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post doesn't expect him to truth up anytime soon. "Indeed, all signs are to the contrary — most glaringly Trump’s chock-full-of-lies tweet that 'I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.' "
A very stupid example, Ms. Marcus! There is not even one lie in the tweet, let alone a bunch of them. Although verifiable in principle, Trump's tweet is unverifiable in practice. Trump had no solid evidence for the truth of his assertion. Still, it could be true. Don't forget the 'necro-vote' (a word I just coined) and the illegal vote. Trump's epistemic 'sin' was not that he stated what is not the case with the intention to deceive but that he confidently asserted something for which he had insufficient evidence. He pretended to know something he could not know. Very annoying, and possibly a violation of a Cliffordian ethics of belief, but not a lie.
So he didn't lie. What he did was close to what Harry Frankfurt defines as bullshitting in On Bullshit, a piece of close analysis, fine, not feculent, that was undoubtedly more often purchased than perused. The bullshitter doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience. Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them.
So you could fairly tax Trump in this instance with bullshitting. He shot his mouth off in a self-serving way without much concern over whether what he said is true. But why pick on Trump?
Because you are a leftist and thus a purveyor of double standards.
Obama bullshits with the best of them. A prime example was his outrageous claim that 99.9% of Muslims reject radical Islam. It is false and known to be false. (You can check with PEW research if you care to.) Now was Obama lying in this instance or bullshitting? A lie is not the same thing as a false statement. Let us be perhaps excessively charitable: Obama made a false statement but he had no intention of deceiving us because he did not know the truth. (Compare: G. W. Bush was wrong about the presence of WMDs in Iraq, but he did not lie about them: he was basing himself on the best intelligence sources he had at the time.)
But that Obama is pretty clearly bullshitting is shown by the cliched and falsely precise 99.9% figure. The whole context shows that Obama doesn't care whether what he is saying is true. He said it because it fits his narrative: Islam is a religion of peace; we are not in a religious war with Islam; Muslims want all the same things we want, blah, blah, ad nauseam. The difference between this case and the Trump tweet is that we know that Obama was wrong, whereas we don't know that Trump was wrong.
So once again we have a double standard. Trump is 'post-truth'; but Obama and Hillary are not?
A correspondent has just emailed me, completely out of the blue, to tell me that you're a “racist, islamophobe, bigot”. Thought you would like that. 😀
I like it very much except that he leaves out the remaining SIXHIRB epithets: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, and homophobic. But three out of seven ain't bad.
To understand the Left, you must understand that they see politics as war. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means. I wish it weren't so, and for a long time I couldn't bring myself to believe it is so; but now I know it is so.
David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:
In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.
You have only thirty seconds to make your point. Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it. Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life. Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich. Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case. You are politically dead.
Politics is war. Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)
As the old saying has it, "All's fair in love and war." And so it is no surprise that leftists routinely proceed by the hurling of the SIXHIRB epithets.
One soon learns that it does no good patiently to explain that a phobia is by definition an irrational fear, that fear of radical Islam is entirely rational, and that therefore it is a misuse of 'phobia' to call one who sounds the alarm an Islamophobe. Nor does it do any good to point out to those who use these '-phobe' coinages that they are thereby refusing to show their interlocutors respect as persons, as rational beings, but are instead ascribing mental dysfunction to them. Our enemies will just ignore our explanations and go right back to labeling us sexists, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic . . . deplorable, etc.
Again, it is because they see politics as a war to the death.
Leftists that they are, they believe that the end justifies the means. They see themselves as good people, as their 'virtue-signaling' indicates, and their opponents as evil people. So why to their minds should they show us any respect?
To ask Lenin's question, What is to be done? One has to punch right back at them and turn their Alinskyite tactics against them.
"But aren't we then no better than them? We are hen doing the same things they do!"
Suppose A threatens to kill B, shoots at him but misses. B shoots back and kills A. Suppose the weapons are of the same type. Both A and B instantiate the same act-type: shooting at a man with the intention of hitting him using a 1911 model .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol.
While A and B 'do the same thing,' B is morally and legally justified in doing it while A is not. So there's the difference.
We are defending ourselves against leftist assault, and this fact justifies our using the same tactics that our enemies use.
This helps explain the appeal of Donald Trump. He knows how to punch back, unlike Mitt Romney, Jeb! Bush, and so many other clueless gentlemen who "seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union . . . ."
Examine a coastal Democratic establishmentarian, and there is little discernable difference in his lifestyle, income, or material tastes from those conservatives (usually poorer) whom he accuses of all sorts of politically incorrect behaviors.
I should think a conservative would want to resist all pointless innovations. The correct spelling points back to the Latin. Leibniz spoke of the identitas indiscernibilium not the identitas indiscernabilium.
I want the link to the Latin maintained out of a sort of salutary piety for our tradition.
This is why I write 'tranquillity' rather than 'tranquility.'
Pedantic punctilios? No doubt, which is why I will not draw my weapon if you disagree.
Now go read Hanson's excellent column which is more important than my picayune points supra.
On C-SPAN this morning I watched part of a re-run of a program from last Wednesday. A bunch of leftists were bemoaning Hillary's defeat. One Steve Cobble uncorked a real doozy to the effect that long lines at polling places are a form of 'voter suppression.'
This is too stupid to waste time refuting, but it's good for a laugh.
Turns out this Cobble character writes for the The Nation. Surprise!
For articles of mine on 'voter suppression,' see here.
If I ask how many people showed up at a party, an answer might be 'a few.' Another answer could be, 'quite a few.' The first phrase means a small number, while the latter means a comparatively large number.
It follows that the meaning of 'quite a few' is not built up from the meanings of 'quite' and 'a few.' This is so whether 'quite' is taken to mean entirely or very.
Equivalently, the meanings of 'a few' and 'quite a few' have no common meaning element. 'Quite a few' functions as a semantic unit. Its meaning cannot be arrived at by piecing together the meanings of 'quite' and 'a few.' It must be learned as the unit it is: 'quite-a-few.'
I rejoice in being a native speaker of this irregular and illogical language. Irregular and illogical as she is, she is my thought's alma mater, and I love her dearly.
But my love is not jealous. I do not begrudge the foreigner who attempts to learn my language and share in her charms and foibles.
Some discussion here. My sense of style suggests the avoidance of both.
Example: "When was the last time Democrat, or Republican, tax hikes balanced the budget instead of merely incenting even more government spending?"
Language is fun even in cases in which it doesn't much matter, as here. In politics, however, it matters greatly: he who controls the language controls the debate.
It would seem so. Consider the way Peggy Noonan, no slouch of a political commentator, uses the adjective 'crazy' in this passage about Donald Trump:
He had to be a flame-haired rebuke to the establishment. He in fact had to be a living insult—no political experience, rude, crude ways—to those who’ve failed us. He had to leave you nervous, on the edge of your seat. Only that man could have broken through. Crazy was a feature, not a bug. (The assumption seemed to be he could turn crazy on and off. I believe he has demonstrated he can’t.)
That is perfectly intelligible of course, even though Noonan uses 'crazy' twice as a noun.
The syntactical difference between noun and adjective no doubt remains in place; it is just that a word that traditionally was always used as an adjective is here used as a noun, as a stand-in for the abstract substantive, 'craziness.' A bit earlier in her piece, Noonan uses 'crazy' as an adjective.
(Can you adduce a counterexample to my 'always' above?)
No word has a true or real or intrinsic meaning that somehow attaches to the word essentially regardless of contextual factors. Is the same true of syntactical category? Can every word 'jump categories'? Or only some?
For a long time now, verbs have been used as nouns. 'Jake sent me an invite to his Halloween party.' 'How much does the install cost?' 'An engine overhaul will cost you more the vehicle is worth.' How far can it go? Will tire rotations ever be advertised as 'tire rotates'? 'I thought the rotate was part of the deal!'
Some words have always (?) had a dual use as verbs and nouns. 'Torch,' might be an example.
'I' is an interesting case. (I mean the word, not the English majuscule letter or the Roman numeral.) 'I' is the first-person singular pronoun. But it can also be used as a noun.
Suppose a Buddhist says, 'There is no I.' Is his utterance gibberish? Could I reasonably reply to the Buddhist: What you've said, Bud, is nonsense on purely syntactical grounds. So it is neither true not false.
Other things being equal, one should not mock, deride, or engage in any sort of unprovoked verbal or pictorial assault on people or the beliefs they cherish. So if Muslims were as benign as Christians or Buddhists, I would object on moral grounds to the depiction and mockery of the man Muslims call the Prophet despite the legality of so doing. But things are not equal. Radical Islam is the main threat to civilized values in the world today. Deny that, and you are delusional as Sam Harris says. The radicals are testing us and provoking us. We must respond with mockery and derision at a bare minimum. The 'Use it or lose it' principle applies not only to one's body, but to one's rights as well. For the defense of liberty, the enemies of our rights must be in our sights, figuratively at least, and this includes radical Islam's leftist enablers.
Hillary, for example, who won't even call it what it is.
