Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts

Saturday, October 14, 2023

"... but ..."

It's a universal truth - as well as an immutable internet meme - that the opening phrase "I'm not a racist, but..." will always be followed by some scorchingly obvious racist shit. (obvious usually to everyone but the speaker, and to those who either share his beliefs or haven't quite thought it through)

So think it through, dammit


Opinion by Alexandra Petri

The word ‘But’ asks that it not appear in these sentences


INTERNET, October 2023 — The word “But” has been stunned to find itself appearing in an increasing number of sentences that begin “The killing of children is never acceptable ... ”

After finding itself in yet another Instagram comment, preceded by the phrases “I am devastated to read about the loss of life” and “I deplore the killing of civilians, especially children,” the word “But” described itself as “horrified” to be included. Although it did not specify what sentiment came after it — possibilities included the phrases “should have had different parents,” and a reference to making omelets and breaking eggs — “But” took to social media to beseech other posters to avoid making this mistake.

The coordinating conjunction begged that those phrases be added to the list of sentences in which it would not appear under any circumstances, a list that already includes: “You never have to compliment Stalin for any reason”; “I don’t want to suggest that slavery wasn’t an unmitigated evil”; and “Genocide is always bad.” The words “Nevertheless,” “Still” and “However” jointly concurred in “But’s” statement, though “Nevertheless” looked visibly tired and strained.

“‘I am against the killing of children, regardless of who their parents are or where they live,’ is a set of words that never should be accompanied by any of us,” their statement read. “If you notice that you are putting us in, please, we beg you, reconsider.”

“But” also asked to be left out of sentences that start with “Of course, I condemn the deaths of innocent civilians,” and, especially, “I object to war crimes.”

“‘I believe in the inherent dignity of human life’ is a sentence that is getting along just fine without me,” “But” observed, a sentiment with which “Nevertheless” said it concurred “a thousand times.”

In a separate statement, the noun “Collateral Damage” and the adjective “Inevitable” asked to stop being forced to appear together.

“But” concluded its statement by saying it would return to anxiously watching someone compose a post that began “There is no excuse for antisemitism” and praying not to be called into service.

Thursday, January 27, 2022

What's Wrong With Conservatives?

And of course the short answer can go a coupla different ways:
  1. Who the fuck knows? But it's pretty fuckin' scary.
  2. How much time you got? This could take a while.
As is usually the case, it's complex, and we need to be constantly working at understanding the problem, so we can develop countermoves and workarounds.



Things Conservatives Get Wrong About 1984

Conservatives love to miss the point of popular literature. I’ve lost count of the number of conservatives who didn’t get that the bad guys in Atlas Shrugged were crony capitalists, not the mean old government, and let’s not even get into the ones who think Jesus wanted people to be rich. A popular book to bring up to denounce leftism is George Orwell’s dystopian science fiction novel 1984, where Britain is placed under a permanent authoritarian surveillance state. Usually, they get things completely wrong.

Newspeak is Not About Adding New Words

In 1984, Newspeak is the evolving fictional language of the Oceania government meant to alter the way people think and thus limit subversion. Conservatives love to claim any new descriptor of a social phenomenon is Newspeak, especially if it involves trans people.
Newspeak didn’t work by giving people vocabulary to describe evolving understanding of the gender spectrum or any other concept. The purpose of Newspeak was to eliminate words.
It’s literally described in the book as the only language that gets smaller every year rather than bigger, reducing the nuance of thought so that everything could be described only vaguely. The more conservatives try and shoehorn people into fewer boxes, the more like Newspeak they actually are because insisting “there are only two genders” is by definition eliminating the progress of scientific understanding.

The Big Brother Government Was Not Communist

The fictional Big Brother government has become shorthand for any government that is totalitarian and brooks no challenge from the people. This has often been translated into communism by people who do not understand the concept or the person who wrote the book.
It should go without saying that George Orwell was virulently leftwing his entire life. He fought during the Spanish Civil War and went over there specifically to kill right-wing fascists. While he was deeply critical of authoritarian communist governments like the Soviet Union (Stalinists forced him to flee the war), his Big Brother government was neither communist nor capitalist, and drew heavily on the right-wing government in Nazi Germany. It was a condemnation of what happens when a government has no checks and balances, something modern American Republicans seem to be working toward with their voter suppression bills.

Orwell went to his grave as an avowed socialist who believed that such a system was the only thing that could truly liberate a people. Anything else, communist or capitalist, he felt was destined to end up oppressive. The problem with the Big Brother government is not that it’s big, but that it is ruled from the inside by a tiny group of elites waging a class war.

Regulation is Not Equivalent to Big Brother Watching You

The phrase “Big Brother is watching you” appears frequently in the novel as a reminder that the state wishes total control over the people’s lives. It’s fitting for a story set in Britain, being that London is one of the most surveilled cities in the world. Conservatives tend to equate being watched at all with 1984.

Throughout the novel, we never get a glimpse of the Big Brother government engaged in actual beneficial regulation. Their entire focus is to squash any sort of unapproved artistic expression and to keep the proles on the edge of subsistence so that they are engaged only with surviving. There’s never a mention about, say, an equivalent of the FDA or enforcement of labor protections. There’s no welfare state either, apparently. At least, not for the average person. Forcing people to wear a mask during a pandemic is not something the Big Brother government would ever be likely to do because no matter how many people with eagles in their profile pics say it, that is not actually a matter of control. Authoritarian government do not do things that empower and protect their general populations as a rule.

Orwell believed with all his heart that what stopped brutal dictatorships was having the average worker in a position of power. He wanted people organized, voting, able to express themselves, and not controlled by either the government or corporations. He wanted a world of “free AND equal human beings.” Conservatives often conveniently miss the equal part in his writings.

I think the main point is that the conservatives' approach continues to affirm my Daddy State Awareness Rules. (eg: they change history, and the meaning of words, and they deny reality in order to dictate an alternate reality to us)

In the case of 1984, they can rely on Americans being ignorant of the details, but somewhat familiar with the story's basic concept: that it's about an evil government. Which of course they think fits perfectly with their campaign to vilify all things governmental. And they don't have to worry that anyone will get hip to their trick of saying one thing now and the opposite of that thing later (just like what happens in the book), because outright contradiction is their stock-in-trade (just like it is for The Ministries in the book).

So, conservatives do that thing they do - they say 1984 is about something it's not really about, and then proceed to take everything bad that they're doing, liken it to what goes on in the story, and then project it all onto their opposition.

Basic Daddy State shit.

The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating their power.

The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.

Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept their premise that they can do anything they want.

THE GOAL IS
TO DICTATE REALITY TO US

Wednesday, November 03, 2021

Today I Learned

I'll call it apocryphal - but it sounds pretty plausible.

dead as a doornail:

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

Deep Thought

overheard

Seems like the word "ambiguous"
should have more than one meaning.

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Seeing Things


paradohleeuh 

Pareidolia is the tendency for perception of a visual stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer.

Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, or lunar pareidolia like the Man in the Moon or the Moon Rabbit. The concept of pareidolia may extend to include hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing voices (mainly indistinct) or music, in random noise such as that produced by air conditioners or fans.

Pareidolia was at one time considered a symptom of psychosis, but it is now seen as a normal human tendency. Scientists have taught computers to use visual clues to "see" faces and other images.







Thursday, March 11, 2021

Language Arts


English is such a crazy fun language - just look

The word "Knot" has a silent "K"
"Knock" has 2 silent "Ks"
"Republican" has 3 silent "Ks"
And "knick-knack" has 4!

See? Isn't English a kick?
Ope - there's another one!



Saturday, March 06, 2021

Today's Word Porn

The word "queue" is on the short list of 
The Most Ironic Things.

It's the letter 'Q' followed by
a bunch of silent letters waiting in line.

Wednesday, September 02, 2020

Acronym Alert


word: FOCUS.
usage: When arguing with a MAGAt.
"Fuck Off Cuz U're Stoopid."

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Dots



An awful lot of talk goes on about 45* and "the base"

In Arabic,
"the base" translates to "al qaeda"

Birds of a radical feather





Thursday, May 07, 2020

Vox Tox

This is quite possibly my new favorite person in the whole wide world.


Sandi Toksvig:

Sunday, September 22, 2019

Today's Tweet



This is an encore performance, because I finally hit on something that I can use to describe the phenomenon:

Intellectual Homeopathy - being convinced that knowing absolutely nothing is the pinnacle of enlightenment.

Monday, February 04, 2019

Hey - We Got Rules, Ya Know

I before E except after C, unless your weird neighbor, Keith, buys eight counterfeit beige sleighs from a feisty over-caffeinated foreign weightlifter.

Everybody got it now?



Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Fun With Anagrams


Silent.
Listen.
We need exactly the same letters to spell both of those words.

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Keith


I really don't like being constantly amazed that people I went to school with seem to demonstrate the most appalling lack of education. They went to the same schools as I did, dammit - how do they have no recollection of (today's example) "the symbol is not the thing" that we heard over and over again in the Semantics Unit in Language Arts our sophomore year?

Yeah, OK, high school's getting to be a very long time ago, but how do you not know that one?  The average partly-trained orangutan knows that one. At the very bottom of your mid-brain, there's a solid understanding of the concept. And when it's triggered, it should pop right up to the surface.

The anti-intellectual conditioning - the dimming of America - has been pretty effective. 

The Treachery Of Images (video)

Friday, August 11, 2017

Words

St George of Carlin, in a prophetic address to The Press Club.


hat tip = FB Friend D Rapier

Thursday, July 27, 2017

It Gets Worse


The Mooch - the guy 45* brings in to be this century's version of Nixon's Plumbers - one of the pros - yeah, that guy - he called Ryan Lizza more or less outa the blue, talked pure shit about Reince Preibus for 30 minutes or so, and then bitched because he'd meant for it to be off the record, but hadn't bothered to make that clear to Lizza.  Yeah - the guy's a real pro.

The New Yorker:

On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director. He wasn’t happy. Earlier in the night, I’d tweeted, citing a “senior White House official,” that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with President Trump, the First Lady, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. It was an interesting group, and raised some questions. Was Trump getting strategic advice from Hannity? Was he considering hiring Shine? But Scaramucci had his own question—for me.

“Who leaked that to you?” he asked. I said I couldn’t give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he’s inherited in his new job. “I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can’t help themselves,” he said. “You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.”

In Scaramucci’s view, the fact that word of the dinner had reached a reporter was evidence that his rivals in the West Wing, particularly Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, were plotting against him. While they have publicly maintained that there is no bad blood between them, Scaramucci and Priebus have been feuding for months. After the election, Trump asked Scaramucci to join his Administration, and Scaramucci sold his company, SkyBridge Capital, in anticipation of taking on a senior role. But Priebus didn’t want him in the White House, and successfully blocked him for being appointed to a job until last week, when Trump offered him the communications job over Priebus’s vehement objections. In response to Scaramucci’s appointment, Sean Spicer, an ally of Priebus’s, resigned his position as press secretary. And in an additional slight to Priebus, the White House’s official announcement of Scaramucci’s hiring noted that he would report directly to the President, rather than to the chief of staff.

Scaramucci’s first public appearance as communications director was a slick and conciliatory performance at the lectern in the White House briefing room last Friday. He suggested it was time for the White House to turn a page. But since then, he has become obsessed with leaks and threatened to fire staffers if he discovers that they have given unauthorized information to reporters. Michael Short, a White House press aide considered close to Priebus, resigned on Tuesday after Scaramucci publicly spoke about firing him. Meanwhile, several damaging stories about Scaramucci have appeared in the press, and he blamed Priebus for most of them. Now, he wanted to know whom I had been talking to about his dinner with the President. Scaramucci, who initiated the call, did not ask for the conversation to be off the record or on background.
Score Card
Fuck - 6
Cock - 3
Shit - 1


Overheard on the intertoobz: "The guy's a pinky ring with legs."