Surely one of the idiocies of the age is the oft-repeated, "Diversity is our strength." Anyone who repeats this bit of thoughtless group-speak wears his folly like a scarlet letter. I'll leave it to the reader to work out why the falsehood is false and how it illustrates the fallacy of false abstraction. Why do I have to do all the work?
But a soupçon of sanity is beginning to glimmer in the heads of some of the original progenitors of DEI nonsense. See here.
This morning at The New Yorker:
At this point, we know everything there is to know about Donald Trump. His diehard admirers—not all seventy-four million people who voted for him in the 2020 election but his immovable base, maybe thirty per cent of Republicans—admire him still, now more than ever. Is he a racist? Sure, by many definitions.
At this point I stopped reading. I cannot think of one reasonable definition of 'racist' according to which Trump would count as a racist. Can you? At least the journo* gives some evidence of understanding that the question whether so-an-so is an X depends on the definition of 'X.'
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*'Journo' is my term of disapprobation for hack journalists a crapload of whom can be found among the 'woke.'
I sometimes refer to the current pope as Bergoglio the Termite to underscore the destructive effect he is having on a once-great institution. Early this morning it occurred to me that I might write a post comparing the various termites undermining our institutions. Of course 'President' Joe Biden immediately came to mind. Just now, an e-mail crossed the transom pointing me to an article in which William Kilpatrick, whom I have often approvingly quoted, does part of the job for me, comparing the termitic attributes of Bergoglio and Biden. I recommend it for your perusal.
Needless to say, when I refer to Bergoglio as a termite, that is a figurative use of language: I am not suggesting that he is literally an insect or ought to be 'rubbed out' by chemical or other means. People who cannot distinguish between the literal and the figurative show a lack of intelligence. Most recently, Joe Scarborough of MSNBC and others of his scrofulous ilk have shown this lack of intelligence when they failed to grasp that Donald Trump's recent use of 'bloodbath' was figurative, not literal.*
Joey B struggles with the distinction as well. Remember his “The American people literally stood on the brink of a new Depression”? That was around 2013 if memory serves.
It is worth noting that not every term of abuse is purely abusive: 'termite' as applied to Jorge and Joseph (both of whose initials are 'J. B.') is not purely abusive in that it contains a factual core: both of these clowns are in fact working to destroy their respective institutions. Wittingly or unwittingly? I am inclined to say wittingly in the case of Bergoglio, unwittingly in the case of the demented Biden.
There is of course a serious moral question connected to the use of abusive language meant to express contempt for fellow human beings. But in a war against such anti-civilizational forces as we now face, different rules of engagement are permissible. Or so it seems. A hard nut to crack.
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*You could of course respond to me that Scarborough and Co. understand the literal-figurative distinction and also understand that context is crucial in the interpretation of anyone's oral or written remark. They probably do. But then it is even worse for them: they are trying to bamboozle the American people. This is a moral defect, which is worse than a failure of understanding. Dripping with intellectual dishonesty and disregard for truth, these people warrant our contempt
That's true. No person is illegal. But who ever said that any person was?
'Woke' knuckleheads of the sort who recently criticized Joey B's SOTU reference to Lincoln Laken Riley's murderer as 'an illegal' regularly give something like the following lame argument:
1) No person is illegal.
2) If any person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien,' then some persons are illegal.
Therefore
3) No person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien.'
Therefore
4) The expression 'illegal alien' and such related expressions as 'illegal immigrant' must be banned.
There is no need to concern ourselves with the inferential move from (3) to (4). The argument is unsound because (2) is plainly false.
To see that it is false you have to be able to distinguish between agent and action, between doer and deed. 'Illegals' are so-called because of their illegal action, namely their illegal entry into the country, and not because they themselves, as agents, are illegal.
Of course, an appeal to sweet reason will get you nowhere with a leftist; what they understand is the hard fist of unreason.
As I have said many times, it is unreasonable to expect that all disputes can be settled reasonably.
And yet we have to have reasons at the ready for the reasonable.
That is why I wrote the above. Besides, I'm a natural-born scribbler who just loves to write, and loves to read what he has written. The life of the mind is its own reward.
They mean woke globalist plutocracy, or something in the semantic vicinity thereof. This is why the enemies of the people see nothing contradictory in using 'lawfare' to keep Donald Trump off the ballot. We the people, however, understand 'democracy' to mean rule by the people. On this understanding of the word, it makes no logical sense to attempt to defend democracy anti-democratically, that is, by silencing the vox populi.
The Orange Man, however, gets the last laugh since SCOTUS has spoken, 9-0. Even Justice Jackson went along, she who doesn't know what a woman is. Has she grown a pair?
The THC level of the stuff smoked in Colorado these days is much higher than that of the weed smoked back in those fabulous and far-off '60s. And the Coloradans, unlike Bill Clinton, inhale. The Rocky Mountain high is now 'plutocratically' high. Are the higher THC levels a causal factor, along with high altitude, in the etiology of Coloradan chucklephuckery?
Is that a rhetorical question or am I really asking? And what about the immediately preceding question? Rhetorical, or am I really asking?
Hot damn, if I didn't enjoy writing the above! The joy of blog. Seriously, though, mockery and derision are among the weapons we must deploy against our political enemies.
The language lemming hears a word or phrase, thinks it 'cool,' and just has to use it whether or not it makes sense. 'Demo' below is being used as an abbreviation of 'demolish.' Now there is something dubious about the excessive use of abbreviations these days, but let that pass. The point I want to make is that, below, the correct word is 'replace' not 'demolish.' Of course, you, or rather a highly suggestible 'liberal' language lemming, could demolish a carpet that has been removed, although it is not clear how one would go about doing that. The point is that a replacement is not a demolition.
Does language matter? Well, does it matter if we refer to illegal aliens as 'migrants'? If not, then it won't matter that 'migrant' is now being replaced by 'newcomer.'
Example du jour: 'Gun Buy Back'
Top o' the Stack.
Sometimes, however, it is better to look before you leap.
Note this curious philo-lang point: 'he' above, though grammatically classifiable as a pronoun, does not function logically as a pronoun: it has no antecedent. It functions as a sex-neutral universal quantifier, or rather, it functions as an individual variable bound by a universal quantifier. Thus the maxim translates as 'For any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.'
I know what conservatives such as Sean Hannity mean when they employ the above expression, but the expression is inept. There cannot be two tiers of justice, one for the rulers and the other for the ruled, or one for Democrats and the other for Republicans, for the simple reason that justice in Anglo-American law is equal justice, one justice for all. A guiding principle of our republic, as the Pledge of Allegiance attests, is "liberty and justice for all." We are all (to be considered to be) equal before the law. Whether you are Joe Biden or Joe Blow, you are subject to the same laws. And the same goes for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It is a guiding ideal essential to our system of government. That it is being egregiously violated in the case of Trump does not make it any less of an ideal.
Joe Sixpack will say, "This is all just semantics." That is the sort of response one expects from a barfly at Joe's Bar and Grill. Someone who says that has not grasped the truth I have been hammering on for the last twenty years: Language Matters!
Julian Epstein, Democrat, on Crooked Joe. (HT: Tony Flood) There is hope for some Dems.
I'm not totally opposed . . .
Top o' the Stack.
I strive for one Substack upload per day, no more. Why only one? Out of consideration for my readers. In these hyper-kinetic and hyper-connected times, an excess of 'incoming' can be annoying.
Leftists want to limit your vocabulary so as to limit your thought and make you easier to control. They want total control. David Horowitz says it well on his masthead, "Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out." (When a transgressive calls herself 'progressive,' you know there's a cesspool of mendacity up ahead.)
perseveration /pər-sĕv″ə-rā′shən/noun
- Uncontrollable repetition of a particular response, such as a word, phrase, or gesture, despite the absence or cessation of a stimulus, usually caused by brain injury or other organic disorder.
- The tendency to continue or repeat an act or activity after the cessation of the original stimulus.
- The act or an instance of persevering; perseverance.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition • More at Wordnik
Dubious Latin questioned over at Substack.
A big Stack attack on language abuse and wokeassery.
The importance of language and the injustice of 'equity.'
Top o' the Stack.
Roger Donway writes,
As I understand it, there are no "gender-neutral" nouns or pronouns in English. There is the masculine gender, the feminine gender, the neuter gender, and the common gender. The last applies to entities which have sex, but in contexts where both sexes are included or the sex is undetermined. "Someone has forgotten his umbrella." "Someone" and "his" are in the common gender. So, they do possess grammatical gender. They are not "gender neutral." Not positive about this, however.
Excellent comment, Mr. Donway. You're right. Strictly speaking, gender is a grammatical category with the four subcategories you mention. I was being sloppy in violation of my own principles. Properly expressed, my point was that 'man' has a legitimate sex-neutral use in standard English. When used to refer to both males and females, it is sex-neutral but not gender-neutral for precisely the reason you supplied: so used, the term's gender is common.
The sex of an animal is biologically based and therefore not a linguistic construct. This fact notwithstanding, it strikes me as legitimate to extend the sense of 'gender' so as to cover social roles. For example, traditionally women as a group have instantiated the nurse role and not the doctor role. No surprise: women can give birth, which biological fact makes women as a group more nurturing than men as a group and suits them for the nurse role. I have no objection to referring to the nurse role, a social role, as a gender role, midway as it is between the biotic/biological and the grammatical.
But this is an extended use of 'gender.' Strictly speaking, gender is a grammatical category!
A spectacularly clear example:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.
Exercise for the reader: explain the bias.
