One of the distinguishing features of authoritarian societies is the language becomes lifeless and dull. At the same time, the public space is filled with the language of the authoritarian ruling system. The people at the top give long arid speeches and their propaganda organs fill the spaces in between with official noise. Fidel Castro would give speeches that lasted half a day. Stalin would deliver long harangues to the Party Congress for no other reason than to fill the room with words.
In America, this started to creep in after the Cold War. Bill Clinton would give long speeches that were cognitively meaningless. The word “emote” came into common usage at this time as his speeches were like the “feelies” in the Huxley novel Brave New World. They were not intended to stimulate your mind, but rather to anesthetize it so you could experience the raw emotion being conveyed. His most memorable words are those from his rare confessions of guilt.
Obama took it further by delivering nonsense speeches that were not just devoid of meaning, but an assault on the concept of meaning. His language was an assault on the mind, an effort to destroy reason. Instead, the listener was supposed to abandon his senses and float along on the warm thermals of passive happiness. His fans swore he was a great speaker, but they never quoted him. To quote the great man would invite questioning the great man and that was not permitted.
Authoritarian systems use language to suffocate and stifle the mind, because people thinking independently is always a danger. The point of regime language is to strip language of its meaning. Demagogic language makes the people incapable of the objectivity and perspective that leads to questioning. Questioning naturally leads to the formation of individual ideas. Regime language seeks to destroy the independent mind by stripping the language of meaning.
One result of this is some people become parrots, repeating slogans and catchwords without understanding what they mean. These people are so fearful of any deviation from the prescribed opinions, they only use the terms provided by the regime. It is a ritualized self-degradation. To express and judge all opinions in the accepted clichés and phrasing of the regime is to accept that words and the concepts behind them have no independent meaning.
It is logocide, the deliberate killing of words in order to kill the concepts that lie behind those words. The most obvious example is “fascist”, which no longer has a cognitive meaning in modern society. It exists only to trigger an emotional response tuned to meet the needs of the regime. The structure of modern Western government is about as close to fascism as we have come since the middle of the last century, but the word itself now means anyone who opposes the regime.
A current example of logocide is the war on information. Regime media now obsesses over misinformation and disinformation. Both words are used interchangeably, despite having very different meanings. The former means false information that is often intended to deceive. The latter is official lies promoted by the institutions of authority in order to deceive the people. By conflating these meanings, this important distinction falls away and both words just mean unofficial opinion.
Regime media has declared war on misinformation and disinformation, despite being the primary source of it. The social media publishers regularly announce their progress on the war on misinformation. Of course, the government is the biggest source of disinformation, yet no one questions them. This absurd bit of theater is intended to strip the very concept of truth from the minds of the people. It is a form of menticide intended to make people dependent on the regime.
The point of logocide is to cripple the ability of the people to think independently and to prevent them from sharing information with others. If no one can trust what words mean, you cannot trust the ideas behind those words. One of those ideas is the concept of personal trust. If your best friend is just as susceptible to repeating false information as the stranger on the street, that friends can no longer be trusted. The natural bonds between people fall away and everyone is a node of the state.
This even happens to the people tasked with assaulting the language. Look at the subhead from this story in a regime tabloid. “Journalists and academics are developing a new language for truth. The results are not always clearer.” Imagine the intellectual bankruptcy required to manufacture the phrase “new language for truth.” The person who wrote that is dead inside. They are a shuffling zombie incapable of action not directed by the people who now control his mind.
Notice also the creepy flavorless language of the age. No one speaks in the first person unless they are displaying fidelity to the system. In the corporate space, everything is written in soft passive language stripped of declarative statements. Corporate communication sounds like it comes from an encounter session. The people behind it are incapable of independent thought. They fear deviation and degrade themselves with therapeutic language to magnify their obsequiousness.
This is why authoritarian systems are minimalist. They lack beauty, creativity and vitality because those are burned up in the engine of authoritarian rule. A people living in fear of their own curiosity are not inventing new ways to solve problems. That requires independent thought, which means an independent language. When the point of the system is to kill the meaning of words, there can be no independent thought so there can be no new ideas, just the approved ideas.
This is what we see in the West. The suffocating conformity of thought is boiling off the will to solve problems and challenge old solutions. The centers of cultural production are now manned by automatons. They are decorated in the trappings of past creativity, but they are like mannequins in a museum display, interesting only to those who maintain their ability to see what is happening. Otherwise, the culture is a repetition of the banal official clichés and slogans.
This is what makes language the great threat to the authoritarian. To call a man in a dress a crossdresser, rather than use an approved neologism, offends the puppets of the regime, because it threatens the foundation of the regime. Clear language conveys clear meaning which implies clear truths. Standing on truth allows for the questioning of the official language and by extension, the authority of the system. The antidote to authoritarianism is truth and the honest language it requires.
The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!
Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.
The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.
Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at
sa***@mi*********************.com
.
i don’t think logocide is intentional, or works as intended if it is intentional. maybe the ruling class really is incoherent in their thinking and their speech? this is just the byproduct of their rule. also, people route around central control efforts. how much guidance does the ghetto take on language issues, or narratives? they just do what they want, as usual. so you can cow normies into following your crazy talk rule, that’s a normie for you! but normies don’t matter, so cowing them might be amusing, but you haven’t accomplished anything useful. the people that matter aren’t about… Read more »
For anyone inclined to conspiracy theories, or even just some inductive logic, I’ve always thought that the sheer consistency and effective psychological manipulation generated by leftist terminology must emanate from some central location somewhere. If the Frankfurt School were still in business, I’d point to that as prime contender. But there are certainly other candidates, Tavistock, SAGE, Rockefeller Foundation, CIA, fill in the blank. The most likely is one hidden away, or hidden in plain sight. Its job is to take the current pulse of the peons regarding some issue, devise semantic memes and buzzwords to nudge the masses appropriately,… Read more »
Submitted for your amusement. Here’s a car with a curious name. No word whether it’ll be targeted to a certain urban demographic 🙂
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/cars/article-10263523/Seven-seat-Dacia-Jogger-costs-14-955-Ford-Fiesta.html
Just a note that this article was posted in Freerepublic
Getting good reviews too
It’s simple, really.
Control the vocabulary -> control the language
Control the language -> control the narrative
Control the narrative -> control . . .
Damned near everything!
Bestselling Leftist bumper sticker of all time?
‘Question Authority’
I think Z Man is blowing out of proportion a very real thing.
I agree that the language is being degraded. But where I disagree is that this has any real effect on the majority of people. The majority of people don’t watch CNN. They hardly watch news at all. And to imagine that politicians are the idols of the people, who get looked at and aped, is way overboard. I imagine a handful of liberal losers are like that, but even on the liberal side there’s a limited effect present.
Biology > Beliefs > Society> Politics and back around. Bad culture permeates , and can ruin much indirectly.
I think his argument isn’t out of proportion at all. It’s spot on. Have you noticed the enforced language and the subsequent public discourse shift around BLM (and various nu-Marxist ideology), and most especially the language control related to COVID-19? It’s outright redefining racism and censoring science for political ends. The regime control of language is also used to tamp down on all discussion regarding discrimination against whites, or redefining citizenship to squelch any concerns over free-flowing illegal immigration, and so much more. Unfortunately this is not just cable news like CNN, instead it’s literally any and all media —… Read more »
And what’s scary is what you describe is most likely a mass phenomenon of volunteers acting perhaps without full awareness, not controlled (at least directly) by hidden puppeteers.
Were it so, only cable TV.
The university, school boards, NBA, NFL, MLB, NYT, NPR, PBS, Netflicks, advertisers, Google, Facebook, Amazon, BLM, churches, boy scouts, music, military, Pentagon, FBI, ..the air we breath. The verbal bombardment will continue and intensify as necessary until the last apostate is eliminated.
Have you been around middle/upper middle class corporate drones? This language is *everywhere*.
Also, normie already has accepted ‘gay marriage’. When there are not truthful words for things, normie goes along to get along.
The problem the regime has is two-fold. One the dullness and nothingness of their ideas makes it repellent. There is nothing in popular culture that even inspires any more, indeed the destruction, deliberate, of heroes as varied as Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and Captain Picard so people will “love” the replacement has failed, spectacularly. Any vandal with a hammer can destroy something beautiful, but a hammer does not inspire or create love and devotion. Or even respect and admiration. Only fear, and then only when the hammer is wielded. Two is that people tune out the dullness. Dominic… Read more »
💩
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sexpistols/prettyvacant.html
A friendly little reminder here that the translation of Tikkun Olam, per David Goldman, is not “repair the world”.
Tikkun Olam, literally, means “to change reality”.
This last century is theirs. The century of central banking, democracy, and genocide.
They built the system of global predatory vulture capitalism and totalitarian religious communism.
This is the Perfected World. As their founding story says, they thought they could do better than us.
We, who were building pyramids in Alaska 12,000 years ago- because at least one such pyramid is still there.
It can also mean “to rule the eon,” as arguably is happening.
Hebrew has very few words, especially compared to English, which is super-absorbent of other languages—as Hebrew isn’t at all, less so than any civilized language I can think of. That odd linguistic habit of mind is probably how Jews became lawyers, poets, comedians, and good at the old SATs. All of them require comfort with ambiguous (and more) word meanings.
“Bill Clinton would give long speeches that were cognitively meaningless.”
Yes, indeed. Anyone old enough would remember his endless drone nominating Michael Dukakis for president at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. There were cheers from the crowd when he wrapped up “in conclusion . . .”
My foolish young mind thought the humiliation of that speech doomed his career. He was widely ridiculed for it but he owned it and used it to his advantage. In that same election cycle I also remember thinking that Joe Biden was done after his complete humiliation from the Neil Kinnock speech theft.
I learned that Biden is a rage-addled retard when I was a literal child. It’s one of the first “political” ideas I remember having, maybe the first time the real-life news impinged on my kid-brain. 1982-ish, I think? Bad day. My final “political” idea—I don’t have them anymore—was that the last, decisive way to tell real leftists from fake was if they supported Biden in 2020. There has never been a more fascist (in the pejorative/evil sense) American politician. Turns out there are no real leftists and politics isn’t really a thing. I always knew that, but now I *know*… Read more »
It’s done on purpose to demoralize you. Stick a bald retard who just shit his pants up on the podium, or a black guy whose wife has a dick in her dress. It’s a big, in your face, fuck you to Whitey. We destroyed your culture, neighborhoods, churches, schools…now we’re gonna make you watch pervert grifters lecture you as it all burns down.
Those were your young and foolish virtues speaking–mine too at the time. I’ve now learned to discard them and fight like the enemy.
“Welcome To The Machine” Welcome my son Welcome to the machine Where have you been? It’s alright we know where you’ve been You’ve been in the pipline Filling in time Provided with toys and scouting for boys You bought a guitar to punish your ma And you didn’t like school And you know you’re nobody’s fool So welcome to the machine Welcome my son Welcome to the machine What did you dream? It’s alright we told you what to dream You dreamed of a big star He played a mean guitar He always ate in the steak bar He loved… Read more »
The Wall was released 42 years ago yesterday (Nov 30). It was basically the only thing the radio station played or people listened to for the next eight months.
First time I saw the movie I was shocked but also thought it sophomoric. Still think it sophomoric, but also kind of based, you know?
While “crossdressing” describes what the person is doing, I would argue that clearer words to describe that person would be either “pervert” or “insane” or both.
All those words— “pervert”, “insane”, “normal” and “abnormal”— are soon to be outlawed, as hateful “hate speech”. Prior to (IIRC) 1973, homosexuality was listed in the DSM as a pathology. Then, suddenly…. BINGO! It’s PERFECTLY NORMAL! And the people who still look at it as abnormal, are INTOLERANT HATEFUL BIGOTS. Likewise “transgenders”: they used to be seen as seriously-confused people, suffering from gender dysphoria. Not any more! Now it’s the “trans-phobic” people who are the perverts! How sick can you get? To fail to support our heroic “trans” brothers and sisters! Welcome to the New “Normal”! You never thought you’d… Read more »
Pretty sure the people controlling the American psychiatric association and western psychological study in general are closely related to the people who have a stranglehold on the media.
Seems as though a high percentage of those people before 1973 would have been considered to have pathological problems.
The lunatics are running the asylum.
Yep. Gossips and nut jobs— hey, I’ve got a job for you!
They’re nuts.
Call them what they are.
Anything less is thinking the sun rises in the West.
As a Paleocon , I’m also something of a social conservative . So yeah I did. we were well warned well back into the 80’s maybe before. Also given our culture the fact we went Wiemar shouldn’t surprise anyone. Even now a plurality of our population is Anglo Saxon in at least part of their origin as is much of ruling class and our social decay is liable to mirror Anglo Saxon trends. Ultimately the best victory the Left ever won was convincing the Right that individualism is a Conservative value by convincing people that Community rules are the same… Read more »
The simple definitions of normal and abnormal make homosexuality and transgenderism abnormal. If normal means, “the usual, average, or normal state of condition,” then heterosexuality is normal because something like 85-90% of humans are heterosexual. If you have sexual proclivities that only 1% of the population has, you are by definition abnormal. This, the word will likely be outlawed as you remarked.
See it, say it. “Beard nerd in dress.” “Sad girl with her tits sawed off.” If you’re talking to a persuadable person, they’re *relieved* by your attachment to reality. They want it and they’re waiting for it. “Crazy people haven’t changed. It’s up to us how much of it we put up with. We’ve made a mistake.” Etc. Normal people want normal things—and they want to be reminded that they’re normal. Do it every time it’s possible.
But you cannot assume either perversion or insanity from simple weirdness. Ed Wood may have been insane but he was not a pervert; Liberace may have been a pervert but he wasn’t insane. Language – and I think this is the point Z is making – should start with ordinary words used to describe what one sees in front of one’s nose; I remember when we referred to border-jumpers as ‘wetbacks’. Didn’t mean they were terrible people, only that they were here illegally. Of course you cannot use that term now but everyone understood it, plus it was awesome, a… Read more »
Before even glancing at today’s, I prostrate myself before the glory. I dedicate myself to building a temple, with a golden statue of Xir Holy Hausfrau of the Woke West:
“Instead, we saw the entirety of the cloud people leap up on a stool, like a house frau who’s spied a mouse, screaming and waving a broom around.”
I fell asleep to MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The priestesses sermonized about Trump’s Secret Plot To Steal The Election, and taught upon the art of playing dress-up Nursie-Doctor. I dreamed marvelous dreams.
Haha! Breyer used the term “White Supremacy” to describe the South pre-Brown!
I realized the Yankeedom were the original Woke. They overthrew the South, but did not take the freed blacks back home with them.
Imagine yourself as one of those emancipated. Your entire like you had food, shelter, a role, a place, even your own little village at the end of the day.
Now, the South is bankrupt, their money worthless. No white can employ you because they are broke and often homeless too. How are you going to feed yourselves? Where are you going to live?
One of the Civilian Conservation Corps projects back in the Great Depression was going around interviewing former slaves. Their interviews make great reading.
It’s notable how many slaves reported being worse off after Emancipation, and yearning for the good old days when all their needs were being met.
Yeah, the Radical Republicans more or les invented the whole strategy off injecting blacks with rage and envy and weaponizing them against the defeated Confederates — then pulling out and leaving the blacks to rot after they’d plundered the South bare. I guess that’s one reason why they’re so eager to bellow about mug party of Lincoln freed em blacks democratic plantations, because the truth of it does not resound well to the GOP.
As a northerner, or a yankee as some might call me, I still think the yankees were fundamentally pissed off about the diversity, but they couldn’t say it because it’s sinful, or something. I mean, New England was the closest thing to whitetopia this country has produced. Norman Rockwell paintings, and all of that.
I get it, though. Thaddeus Stevens was our Rep. He’s buried 10 or 12 miles from my house. But I’ve always been embarrassed by him, think he was a hateful SOB.
Iwould suggest the work “rights” has a problems too. It seems to have been taken over by those who want to permit wicked things. I would rather ask if something is a good, rather than a right.
Back in the bad old (pre-Floyd) days, it was understood that with every right, comes a corresponding duty. E.g.: I have a right to carry a gun, which includes the corresponding duty to do so safely.
But somewhere along the line, “rights” became “entitlements”: something that I’m entitled to, with no strings attached.
If someone wanted to plunge America into coast-to-coast rioting, all they’d have to do is bring down the welfare system computers, so that all the EBT cards stopped working, and “entitlement” checks stopped arriving. Mayhem!
I tend to agree. One sticking point of libertarian thought is their principled argument that rights are immutable even if exercised to the detriment of the individual or society generally. Thus, if one owns, say, a cheap car, it’s their right to neglect it’s maintenance because they own it, even though a poorly maintained car is much more likely to wreck at an inopportune time, to the detriment of other people. Obviously, viewing the decision of neglect through the lens of “good” would lead to the conclusion that is a generally good thing to, say, require that drivers using public… Read more »
I don’t quite see why you blame the Libertarians for such excess wrt “extreme individualism” and “detriment to the individual”. I know nowhere in the US where Libertarians hold much, if any political power–started in 1971 they peaked in the presidential election of 1980. Yet, we seem to have the homeless and drug addicted everywhere–especially in the large population centers. Stories and documentaries abound about how these folks live (for a brief time anyway) in drug addicted degradation that the same society would not allow a dog to live in. It’s a shame, that I agree, but it’s not the… Read more »
My favorite nonsensical Lightbringer speech was included at the end of the dreary and depressing film, Killing Them Softly:
https://youtu.be/5zK-b0INu1k
Brad Pitt’s character has a point that the modern form of America is just a business that we’re all living in.
As the prophet Derb and others even more ancient have pointed out, for most people fidelity to truth was very much subordinate to espousing ideas and a worldview that complimented a persons emotional alignment. We can see it has been demonstrated once again, on a worldwide scale, that for most people the exercise of freedom, freedom of action, of thought, is very much subordinate to feeling safe and taken care of by others, a general sense of alignment with the herd. A form of government emphasizing self sufficiency and the personal responsibilities of freedom is at odds with the mean… Read more »
I’d suggest that we already have all the ingredients for a valid (defendable) ‘mythology’ about Whites: seeing as how virtually every advance that, taken together, make up human civilization as we know it— in geographic discovery, science, technology, government, philosophy, the arts— all were the achievements of White people.
We ARE the super-race, as far as achievement goes. That’s just historical fact.
This is the particular hell of our times, where we are forced to see ourselves as a race and not as a people We can’t even enjoy the differences, be they ethnic or temperamental, amongst ourselves because we are forced to see ourselves as a race, like a particular breed of tree that loses all of its unique traits because we are forced instead to see it merely as a tree. Just another green blob like all the rest of them. This itself is a form of a lie. It’s a slap in the face of our Creator, whoever that… Read more »
[…] ZMan does some analysis. […]
I have to wonder while Z was writing this was the image of Jen Psaki in his mind?
She was an inspiration ! 😂
“…the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
Obama seemed to believe he was an omnipotent deity. It is remarkable how little we know about him as a person given the fact there was a massive cult of personality worshiping of him. That one dimensional character successfully stoked the fires of anti- Whiteness at every turn.
We went from a bizarre Barry Hussein Soetoro enigma to:
“only Rosie O’Donnell” is a fat pig, slob, dog, disgusting animal.
Trump disappointed and fell short but he did have so many great, unscripted lines.
The early 80’s didn’t have interlinking systems we have today, including universities. It was easier to create fake personas. There’s a reason he dropped Barry Soetero for Barack Obama back then and reading an article several years ago, someone I think probably nailed it. He was a minor coke dealer at Columbia. He was probably arrested for coke dealing, or possession or whatever, and decided to change his identity soon afterwards, including a fake SSN from CT, his original perhaps being in his arrest record. The NYPD was still using a paper filing system at the time, and at some… Read more »
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_International_Corporation
BIC is a CIA front company. In 1983, Barack was employed as a financial analyst writer.
Obama like Biden was merely a vessel for the ideologues or whatever we want to call them, the people steering the ship with a clear direction in mind My impression of Obama, well a few things, was that he more or less told everyone “You want me to be your face? Then you do the work, I take the arrows, but I get paid and get paid well. Deal?” He also gave off the impression, when people were complaining about the economy and small businessmen and the anger toward his “you didn’t build that,” his attitude was “Well if you… Read more »
Watch dreams from my real father, if you can find it. It may still be available through Amazon.
It explains a lot about Berry.
a lot about his grandparents & his mother. Spoiler… his father wasn’t the Kenyon..
Pretty sure the people controlling the American psychiatric association and western psychological study in general are closely related to the people who have a stranglehold on the media.
Seems as though a high percentage of those people before 1973 would have been considered to have pathological problems.
The lunatics are running the asylum.
“A people living in fear of their own curiosity are not inventing new ways to solve problems. ”
This probably comes about as close to a one-sentence explanation of the overall technological stagnation we’ve seen since the early 1970’s as anything we are likely to get. Ever since 1964 or so, the central tenet of American life has been based on a lie, and this has, as they like to say, “downstream consequences” that no one back then saw. When Solzhenitsyn said “Live not by lies” he wasn’t just making a moral statement.
I called Obama the Liar-in-Chief. Remember “If you want your doctor, you can keep your doctor!” ? Remember Obama assuring Americans that the net result of giving 20 million people free health care, would be everyone’s annual premiums dropping by $2500 ? He knew he was lying…. the people around him knew he was lying…. surely at least some people in the regime media knew he was lying…. But when a Sacred Black Man lies, it’s not really a lie, is it? It’s in the service of a higher good: the new, post-racial America Barack was promising to usher in.… Read more »
To be fair, not many politicians tell the truth
Unfortunately, true!
And one can certainly make the case that Trump lied as much as Obama: saying what he knew people wanted to hear in order to get elected, then abandoning his promises once he got in office.
How did the American system suffer such a decline? From giving us candidates like Jefferson and Madison, to offering us the “choice” between shameless grifters like Obama, Hillary, Biden, and Trump?
.
The Founding population was the first one to be overwhelmed by mass immigration. Population around 4 million in 1790 to to ~31 million in 1860. Contrary to the myth of assimilation not many of those eligible pursued citizenship (when the English language requirement was added it dropped to a little more than 40 percent.) We’re in the waning days of 2021 and the current population still hasn’t reached the literacy level of 1790.
And it won’t either! We are not as smart–and White–as the population of 1790. Had we such a population in the 1790’s, we’d never be a United States.
“They lack beauty, creativity and vitality because those are burned up in the engine of authoritarian rule.” – Architecture is a reflection and summation of the cumulative values of society. Take a look at the hideous stuff they’re vomiting into existence these days. It’s ghastly. One thing you may have noticed is the warmed over early 60’s esthetic to the newest construction and the monochromatic gray interiors. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the JFK era was the very high watermark of the current regime. In a sense, the regime is desperately attempting to re-create its high water mark as… Read more »
Jim Kunstler and a few other stalwarts have been excoriating the modern trash passed off as architecture for years.
The quality of the built environment is an enormously important part of society that the West has overlooked since WW2.
It certainly doesn’t help that the pinkos love Brutalism and the #1 hobby of most starchitects is furious hand-rubbing.
Strangely enough, anyone who wears retro black framed glasses generally is a regime supporter. These glasses have been quasi-in style for over 15 years now. It’s a quick identifier for regime stooges. They’re also butt-ugly and really not complementary to any face, which is why they went out of style the first time around.
“Problem Glasses”- it is a meme, just FYI.
Along with danger hair (eccentric hair colors), visible tats, excessive piercings, etc. they act much like nature in that they are a visual indicator and warning sign that you are dealing with an animal probably best avoided.
Face piercings, aka “$hit in the face” or “her face had a fishing tackle accident”
The trifecta is Problem Glasses, Mental Illness Haircut, and hsit in her face. The Unemployment Tattoos are just given by that point, an inevitable comorbidity.
I’ve seen many a pretty female visage violated by these “problematic” frames. (And I understand many girls wear non-prescription lenses just to look smart and important.) They’re almost as off-putting as piercings.
A friend of mine calls them birth control glasses.
JR: no no, BCG’s are the GI military issued prescription glasses. A beautiful, stylish off-brown (some might compare them to the color of excrement), clunky, pair of frames that are scientifically designed to not fit any human face. Fendi wept that he didn’t get to design those bad boys.
That term has a very specific meaning, dont go bastardizing the language.
The current architectural phase is called “industrial modern” which harkens back to mid-century modern (MCM). MCM (or “Mad Men style”) was truly a great style, full of clean lines and woodiness and a touch of color. It is mostly taken from Scandanavian, particularly Danish influence.
The dreck you see in industrial modern is all glassy with metal-brutalist overtones. The good stuff will still use real wood, but that is a happy exception. But mostly I feel like I’m going to get a rectal exam in some of these new office buildings.
I love Saarinen.
Today’s architecture places so-called “sustainability” far above beauty, which itself is a concept very much out of style.
I’m sure some examples are better than others. I was in a new condo building recently that wasn’t totally terrible, mostly from the high ceilings. But I find these spaces to raise blood pressure not lower it.
High ceilings might make sense in a hot climate but all I can think of are the heating and cooling costs. (Same for the “open floor plan” and acres of dead space in bathrooms and bedrooms.)
I enjoy JHK’s Eyesore of the Month on his site.
That was my impression when I went to the new Los Angeles SoFi stadium. It looks like what a person in the 1960s imagined the future would be. That same 1960s futuristic aesthetic. And it was designed not from the inside out but from the outside with the inside an afterthought, to look good from people flying overhead to LAX or to look neat from a blimp flying overhead on Sundays. Inside there is nothing new about any of it, and in fact it is poorly laid out. As if there hasn’t been any new architectural vision since. And maybe… Read more »
Very thoughtful overview. I can only imagine the car break ins at that stadium when its done. I guess the seats are in. Even as a kid I was struck by the cheapness of modern architecture. I was raised in a modernist home from the 60’s. State of the art at the time, not one natural fiber, and I found it to be cheap and boxy. I’m still very anti sliding glass door and don’t get me started on decorative cinderblocks. Comparing it to a nice hacienda style, like what they were doing in the 20’s or something like that,… Read more »
I was on many a Zoom call keeping touch with people and seeing them in these sterile white wall boxes they call apartments was a huge downer, and I would feel like garbage for a day or two. That’s the effect it had — on me. On them it had to be much much worse. Just a crying shame what the authorities are doing to people. If someone is already not strong to begin with, with no support, no job, no social life, yeah they are going to start overdosing and drinking hard and whatever else. What the authorities have… Read more »
well its good that they stopped doing brutalism. But you still have weird styles of homes such as this:
http://web.assess.co.polk.ia.us/cgi-bin/web/tt/basic.cgi?tt=basic/photos/aphotosize&gp=782521304020&size=xlarge&label=a&
Now sure what style you would call it.
Think of Gloria Grahame’s line in The Big Heat: “Early neo-nothing.”
I see Section 8 (rent-controlled) housing like that. All hard right angles and boxes. It speaks to me of the current Socialist mindset. Compartmented ‘truths’ not allowed to interact. Everything built to official standards with no warmth or curvy relaxation. Everything is technically perfect and emotionally dead.
Imagine an NPC meme standing in front of that house. A perfect fit!
This is a very interesting article, and I think it is substantially accurate. I would, however, emphasize more strongly the communicative complicity between the regime, and the media, Hollywood, academia and corporations. Biden alone is hardly capable of wreaking the linguistic damage and destabilization of truth Z describes. It has taken a concerted effort by Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood, Harvard, the New York Times and Silicon Valley to do this sort of damage. As an aside, the best example of the destruction of a word is “vaccine.” By the word’s meaning throughout its history, a vaccine was an injected substance… Read more »
They did the same destruction to the word, “pandemic,” which is now far looser so they can continue this scam.
I think the concerted effort to do this is a mix of intentional planning, some following their Marxist programming, and some instinctive herding behavior.
Did you notice that “vaccine” was named Webster’s word of the year, although they don’t point out the definition is now completely and inherently different than what is was a year ago.
The definition of a “vaccine” is now “a preparation of genetic material (such as a strand of synthesized messenger RNA) that is used by the cells of the body to produce an antigenic substance (such as a fragment of virus spike protein)”.
Note that there is nothing in that definition about preventing or even ameliorating infection, or in fact, any mention of why a “vaccine” is given!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-year/vaccine
Ah, descriptive lexicography at its very worst. Everybody in power is in on the sham.
Yup. “Immunization” used so be synonymous with “vaccination”.
People still say things like, “we eradicated smallpox and polio.”
Now we say, “why would the regime want to do that?”
A quibble…Polio is *not* eradicated.
This is a deeply profound article. How it runs a thread through all these negative and debilitating social phenomena is truly something special.
“both words mean unofficial opinion.”
Really? I take them to mean official opinion.
The primary skillset needed to mantain a ‘Progressive’ point of view, is the art of Not Noticing. You can see what they don’t want you to know, those truths they’re doing their best to hide, by watching how they use language; specifically, what they leave out: An obvious (mis)use of language to distort and obfuscate— rather than to describe and clarify– is the passive tense so often used when reporting crimes committed by Blacks: “gunfire erupted” “gun violence escalated” “shots rang out” As if “gunfire”, “shots”, and “gun violence” were independent entities, acting of their own accord. It’s not violent… Read more »
The statistics on black violence don’t lie, but the sycophants of the left never read past a headline of their favorite propaganda machine. CNN told me that if Kyle Rittenhouse was black he’d have never made it to trial. Reality shows a much different view. A simple google search will land you dozens of blacks who committed outright murder and got off clean just in the past two months. That little bit of effort to search for the truth has been completely removed from our society. Not only that, but if the truth with the supporting data points is presented… Read more »
If Rittenhouse had been Black, he never would have been charged. Likely they would have charged the surviving atracker.
While Blacks are murdering innocent Whites at roughly one a day, the NYT is still reminding us about Emmett Till!
https://vdare.com/articles/32-black-on-white-homicides-including-five-home-invasions-october-2021-another-month-in-the-death-of-white-america
CNN told a rare truth. If Rittenhouse was black he never would have made it to trial because he would never have been charged.
And, of course, right on time, we get Michigan.
Somebody “up there” has a wicked sensayuma.
I imagine very soon the FBI will cease tabulating crime by race. Or, they’ll simply doctor the stats to make blacks look like saintly victims and whites malevolent fiends.
Yep!
Probably as soon as they realize that those stats are “reinforcing racial stereotypes”.
Can’t have that!
What’s a racial stereotype?
It’s what all human beings used to understand about race, up until a few decades ago; but which we now know is TOTALLY WRONG.
.
One of the most gobsmacking features of the postmodern Left is its utter rejection of all knowledge and wisdom accrued before roughly 1900, and the concomitant belief that current mores trump basically the whole of human history. It seems never to occur to them that they have created a bizarre epistemological oxbow of falsity and madness, and that, perhaps a century henceforth, everything they have written and said will be utterly and irrevocably discredited. Normalcy will have reasserted itself.
I only started noticing the assault on language maybe about 6-8 years ago. That is when I started noticing the same turn of phrase showing up everywhere. That was also when I started really noticing how so much of the mass media was loaded with emotional language and narratives. But I started noticing the drop in quality and formality a long time ago.
Want to watch the banality of modern media up close, watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIPT9WC6Vsk
Literally two minutes of catchphrases.
My wakeup call was when they started describing the ability to kill your unborn child as “reproductive rights”
Notice how the idea of being sexually responsible so as to prevent unplanned pregnancies was completely dismissed from discussion. Then they brought in the peoples of colors to strengthen their argument. Any personal responsibility for peoples of colors is considered “racist”. Yet another word which has completely changed meanings.
From 2016 to 2019 I worked at a daytime drop-in homeless shelter in the DC suburbs. I knew two crack whores who’d had 11 and 13 children respectively, all taken away by the State and placed in foster care. Why in the world didn’t they avail themselves of the free birth control that’s readily available to any poor woman? Why weren’t they sterilized after the first couple? When will we wake up and realize that we get more of whatever we subsidize? And that by upping Sha’Niqua’s welfare check with each new baby, we’re rewarding her for her irresponsible and… Read more »
Because that guarantees that Sha’niqua and her fellow blacks will be forever supporters of the Santa Claus regime. Just look at the voting demographics as an example. It is a pointless exercise to attempt to appeal to black America if you are on the right. They are the most tribal. No matter what proof was surfaced, OJ was innocent. If Obama promised to murder their spouses in their sleep his first day in office, they’d still have voted for him just because “he one of us!”. They are a hopeless group. My journey to this side of the great divide… Read more »
People in general, and especially around here would be outraged if they knew just how many “programs” are available to these people that they simply refuse to avail themselves of. Responsibility is for someone else, particularly someone else who actually cares. These women do not care. Their kids are noting more than an abstraction that they “love” in a very abstract way. I actually knew one of these types of women. She was running her mouth one day about her kids, kids she says she would do ANYTHING for. But when she said it, she meant it in a hyperbolic… Read more »
“felon factories”.
Best thing I’ve heard all day.
We need to promote that this makes our government deeply immoral. Honest, straight laced, and responsible people in this country are tethered like oxen in order to carry those that behave and act irresponsibly or deviously. Most serious investigations into disability and welfare fraud have gone by the wayside and everything is rubber stamped. Believe me, I have a relative that’s committing disability fraud, along with many of his friends, and it’s not terribly difficult, as he’s not a high IQ individual. Creators of the numerous hate crime hoaxes almost never face repercussions. Having tons of children is cost prohibitive… Read more »
Yeah, it turns out that EVERYONE prior to around 60 years ago was a “racist” by today’s definition!
Plato, Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill, Einstein…. every last one of them!
Good thing the wokefolk have come along to correct 3,000 years of institutional racism!
Letting us know that ALL our ancestors were BAD! EVIL! Slaveowners!
“….safe and effective…”
“….safe and effective…”
“….safe and effective…”
It’s why I cannot for the life of me consider these people elite in any true sense of the word. They live in a world of pablum and cliche and cant. Animated only by some unfounded anger.
I never wanted to hate democracy, giving the mediocre and the stupid a hand at steering the ship of our civilization, but they are making it easy.
Brilliant post filled with your now expected memorable phrases (“float along on the warm thermals of passive happiness”). Lots to do this morning so back this afternoon to read the rest of the comments from the many witty and wise readers here.
Seriously. What I was going to post. This.
For anyone interested in historical examples of this kind of thing, I recommend Victor Klemperer’s Lingua Tertio Imperii: The Language of the Third Reich. He saw it up close and extremely personal; it’s fascinating stuff.
I’d also recommend his 2 volumes of “I Will Bear Witness”. A bit of a slog, but chilling none the less.
Yeah, a lot of Commie and Nazi stuff is actually impenetrable unless you understand the strange way in which the used words, where very small nuances were vastly important. Kind of like “colored people” and “people of color” today…
Let’s quote the Jews (Kuntsler, Klemperer) to support humanity’s righteous points of view.
And then let’s attack the Jews as enemies of humanity.
Well, at least now I know why Klemperer would write such a treatise. With perfect objectivity, you betcha. That’s the rub, the lesson, Anna. The bad guys won. Not just in 1945. In 712 BC. With Abraham. With Jacob. With Moses. With the province of Judah. The radical 20% successfully purged or carved away from the 80% majority that had wanted to join with the greater White civilization above them. They had sought white brides to the point that they themselves might appear a branch of White. Yet still, that radical 20% demands that they think of themselves as one… Read more »
Excellent piece. To my mind, no single group is more guilty of cognitive meaninglessness than the Harry Jaffa/Lincoln was a demigod/US is the Hegelian apex of history/the US is always on the side of muh freedom school. In other words, the operating ideology of the Republican Party. It’s a peculiar form of gnosticism and needs to be completely suppressed, eradicated and discarded. The damage that man and his school did with their Lincoln myth (that the lonely sage in the long prairie nights discovered, Strauss-like, that the Founders had all along meant “equality” to be the urgrund of the American… Read more »
Long ashes to you.
What a great post today! In thinking about the magical negro, obomba, he was as vapid as they come as were his speeches. In my mind, people weren’t really focused on what he said, but how he said it – the tone and cadence. Many were probably thinking (without realizing it), this black dude can really speak – he sounds just like a White guy. What could possibly be better? On another note, this destruction of language and truth is especially visible in the covid farce. Every covidian parrots the same lies and BS and continues to double and triple… Read more »
Can’t tell you the number of times some Covidiot has told me “Sure, the vaccines don’t prevent you from getting it, but they make it so much less serious!” And then I say “Wow, I guess you really CAN prove a negative, call the Philosophy Department!” Or I say “Do you know what ‘begging the question’ means?” Or I go with a nice simple “Says who? The same guys who told you the vaccines DO prevent you from getting it just a month or two ago?” And then they call me a racist, and then there’s another relationship ruined. I… Read more »
Reminds me of this gem: “Fully vaccinated man dies of COVID-19, daughter says he was cautious”
The daughter says “can’t imagine how much more he would have suffered if he had not gotten the vaccine.”
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/567402-fully-vaccinated-man-dies-of-covid-19-daughter
Can’t make this stuff up. As I tell all the Covidians, when you see the cowardly politicians in hazmat suits hiding in containment bunkers, you’ll know it’s serious. Instead, they’re partying, laughing, always mask-less while telling everyone to stay home and get the jab. No Thanks.
Obama was good at pretending to be what White progs wanted and expected him to be, which is a dark-skinned white person. They wanted to see themselves in him. Obama was even more vapid that they are.
Yeah, Obama was the Magical Negro, the “See, they’re no different than we are!” candidate; whose presence gave GoodWhites an opportunity to virtue-signal and display their tolerance and lack of racism. Obama could not have been elected without a majority of the White vote. Which made it especially funny when he and Michele kept harping on what an awful, racist country America is. I can sort of understand gullible Whites voting for him the first time around, before anyone knew much about him— though I certainly didn’t!— but what really bummed me out was watching America elect him to a… Read more »
David Brooks and the perfect crease in Obama’s pants leg is a great example of what you’re talking about. If tone, cadence, and appearance are all that’s important, let’s elect a hologram.
Simulation of Cary Grant 2024!
the movie “Sleeper” by Woody Allen, all they had was the nose of “Dear Leader”/s
That’s not as bad as, “the thrill,” Chris Matthews got up his leg while listening to the Lightbringer speak.
This is what we see in the West. The suffocating conformity of thought is boiling off the will to solve problems and challenge old solutions.
That phenomenon hasn’t been limited to the West and accounts for the stasis found in other authoritarian societies.
It’s a good rule of thumb that the longer the document, the less meaning it conveys. It’s also a truism that the more people involved in writing a document, the more pointless blather you can expect. Committee meetings, consensus building, and other contraptions of the mass bureaucratic state only serve to make the decisions so vapid and meaningless that no one can object, because there’s nothing in the document of substance to object to. This applies even to technical things, as one can tell when a design document was written by a single person because it is clear, crisp, and… Read more »
“People who enjoy meetings should never be in charge of anything.” – Author unknown
“Obama took it further by delivering nonsense speeches that were not just devoid of meaning, but an assault on the concept of meaning. His language was an assault on the mind, an effort to destroy reason.”
How DARE you?!?!
Everyone remembers his preacher style of speaking. I can hear the voice in my head with ease. What I can’t hear in my head coming from Obama are any meaningful sentences uttered.
The closest I can remember is him making some backhanded comment about gun owners, which was neither clever nor presidential.
Trump, on the other hand, I can pull up a dozen things he said, in his own voice. Not just because I am closer to him ideologically, but because his pithy delivery was so excellent.
Have you noticed this spate of politicians who ape Obummer’s voice? Bootyjudge, Gov of Texas, Mayor Wilhelm of NYC, etc.
Chet: In all honesty, I really can’t recall his “preacher style of speaking” because after trying to warn those idiots I was still speaking to of his hubris and Maoist/Stalinist beliefs back in 2008, I think I listened to him speak once for perhaps a minute or so. Pretty much stopped watching tv news thereafter and stuck solely to the internet. My husband, who tortured himself with more Fox News back then (not any longer!) referred to him as grey gums.
Obama’s anti-White streak was always really visible to anyone willing to look. It was always what I disliked about him from the very first time I ever saw him. His way of speaking only ever rubbed me the wrong way. The press fawning all over him and their endless praise of his way of speaking always seemed to me to be a bit of overcompensation, like they were expecting him to speak in ebonics and were impressed that he could read 3 syllable words in his speeches.
Yes; and his wife Michele— who’s being touted as a possible Democrat candidate for President somewhere down the road— was even more forthright regarding her dislike of Whites, and hatred of traditiinal (White) America.
It’s funny, I rarely listen to political speeches, so I’ve only heard a couple minutes of Obama speaking. Trump, too.
I do this for a reason. The theatrics and emotionality of live speaking cloud reason. If you read a transcript, you have to deal with what was actually said, devoid of stagecraft.
Obama’s real role in life would have been the evening local news reader at a mid-market television station, someplace like Memphis or Erie, PA.
He mispronounced too many words for that job.
In about seventh grade I had a professional-voiced mystery ethnic geography teacher who couldn’t pronounce any Russian names correctly, and he didn’t follow the transliterations in a “hooked on phonics” way either, so the Russian-familiar and the conventionally literate among us were constantly confused and annoyed. Enough parent complaints piled up that he was promoted to dean. As such he gave our daily morning intercom announcements and on our birthdays mispronounced most of our names.
Hearing Obama always brought me back.
Incapable of speaking in the first person? Hell, they blanch at using the proper third person, e.g. “It’s been one week since a car drove through a Waukesha parade.”
NYT style manual:
If it’s a White guy’s fault, use active voice; if it’s a black guys fault use passive voice or anthropomorphize the inanimate object implemented.
Yeah, the Associated Press style manual as well: don’t mention the race of the perp, don’t use words like “looting”, don’t focus on crimes in which “people of color” are “disproportionately represented”.
Describe the world as if it’s the egalitarian place you want people to believe it is.
.
Aside from two (elective) courses on political philosophy in college, my 100% government school education never had a course in logic or anything even near the subject. It was not an accident that the smart kids in my high school and the masses at the flagship university at flyover state were not taught this. My freshman son at his fundamentalist boys school has learned more in his 3 months of Logic than I have in a lifetime as an autodidact. So there are pockets of hope in the world. But the pockets are laughably small in a sea of depravity.… Read more »
I’m curious, could you provide what reading materials they are using? I would like to know so that my kids might be able to make use of them. Thank you.
We should all recreate Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary” for modern times right here on the Zman blog. I will start:
“Vaccines”: mandatory pharmaceutical injections of uncertain efficacy and unknown side effects said to confer immunity against viral infection, but whose only proven benefit is to increase the stock prices of the corporations developing them.
…and grant said corporations complete legal immunity.
Somewhat OT but….I clearly recall hearing about 50 years ago of a definition, perhaps from the Devils Dictionary, that seems to have been purged from the entire web:
“Antisemitism: n, the hatred of Jews more than is reasonable.”
Perhaps the best comment section on the entire internet can give the proper attribution. I’d be proud to claim it as my own but it’s not.
“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
(1984″; Orwell)
“…The most obvious example is “fascist”, which no longer has a cognitive meaning in modern society….”
When one is labelled a fascist (or racist, or science denier, or homophobe, etc.) – it seems the follow up meaningless phrase of choice nowadays is: ya’ know whut ahm sayin’.
Logocide indeed.
Another quality I’ve noticed about modern language is the deification of certain terms and concepts. Certain terms become emptied of nuance and lose their literal meaning. These words become idolized, which kills thought and leads to primitive forms of magical thinking in the user. I’ve noticed this occurs often when a term become used as a proper noun. For instance, Science is no longer a human concept, a practice or method of study. Rather it is a god to be worshiped. Science is the god of knowledge. We “follow” Science. We are not “anti” Science. We are on His side.… Read more »
There’s actually a book about the god “Democracy”:
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/964920-democracy-the-god-that-failed-the-economics-and-politics-of-monarchy
The comment deserves a Pulitzer all by itself.
First, the eloquence of today’s post, and the density of important ideas therein, is almost overwhelming. Where to begin? I guess I’ll go cosmic. I often use the cancer analogy to describe the seriousness of our cultural and societal decline, and a fair assessment of our current status is late Stage 3 or early Stage 4. And today’s post is a good exemplar of the insidiousness and pervasiveness of the cancer’s spread. The Crazy is everywhere and imitating healthy tissue so it appears normal and benign, but is actually killing us in slow motion. As with real biological cancer, we… Read more »
Yep: and the first step in treating any malady, is correctly diagnosing it.
That may be the most damaging effect of the craziness that pervades America: it prevents us from recognizing what ails us.
If we misconstrue the nature and source of the disease, we have no chance at figuring out a cure.
We can see an example of this in the California school systems spending billions of dollars and countless hours over the past 40 years, seeking to ‘close the Black-White performance gap’ in schools. They imagined the cause was environmental…
The great irony is that corruption, censorship and limitation of language makes everyone a potential dissident. When everyone is a political dissident, the system is likely to be toppled.
ANIMAL FARM is my favorite treatment of regime propaganda and how its constant evolution and contradictions put even the mightiest at risk. Tech has created a great contradiction in that censorship simultaneously is easier broadly and more difficult narrowly. Twitter can suspend millions, and that’s a huge deal, but they do have places to go. Orwell would be in hog heaven (pun intended).
It also makes regimes brittle. The Soviet Union was culturally spend by the time Brezhnev took power. He knew it and his circle knew it. The system was running on the inertia from Stalin. To keep in running meant sweeping away any obstacles. When they could not hide the truth of the Afghan debacle, the system started to crack and eventually shattered.
“The antidote to authoritarianism is truth and the honest language it requires.’
You are so 19th century. Alethic and cultural relativism has made all good thinkers realize there is no such thing as truth. Except what the fact checkers tell us.
Yeah, it amazes me they don’t see the logical fallacy, the fact that they’re sawing off the branch they’re sitting on, when they make what amounts to a truth-claim about the impossibility of truth:
“[The truth is that] there’s no such thing as truth”
I suspect the smarter ones see that, but enjoy the freedom it gives them to throw all standards aside and act like they want to.
“To quote the great man would invite questioning the great man…”
1. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
2. “A chicken in every pot.”
3. “You have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”
4. “The buck stops here.”
5. “You didn’t build that.”
Pick out the memorable quote from our former Lightbringer.
“Come on man!” From the leader we deserve.
“Read my lips, no new taxes”
“Read my lips…” vs. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Orwell’s “The Principles of Newspeak” appendix to “1984” and his essay “Politics and the English Language” cover this stuff in a slightly different way. The Newspeak piece might as well be the style manual for the Regime and its media servants.
Not to mention “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.”
In the impending conflaguration – remember to aim for the journalists and editors first. Establish their loyalties and if they are hostile to your – execute them on the spot, the sooner the better. That goes double if it’s a woman. It is no coincidence that the queen is the most deadly piece on the chess board.
While everyone favors executing journalists, they are like feathers in the wind. If the political winds change, they will be the great champions of whatever lies behind those winds. The Russians have a word that generally means “the intellect”. This is a person who posture as an intellectual, but only has a superficial understanding of things. They take positions not out of conviction or rationalist, but as a performance. These were people who cheered the communists, even though they would be dispatched by the communists. Our media selects for bourgeois poseurs. They now cheer for censorship, because that is the… Read more »
“Our media selects for bourgeois poseurs.”
Brilliant. In its literal meaning of “shining.” This is why people read this blog.
Journalists are just one tentacle of academia, along with the bureaucracy, your kids’ schools, and Hollywood. The universities are the brain.
Zman: Quite true, but they are a danger and irritant nonetheless, floating around everywhere like the contents of a pillow fight. They should still be disposed of.
Pour encourage les autres.
Hmpppfffffff. Some maybe. The smaller, inconsequential ones perhaps. But Z, most of these guys are not all brainless, fickle poseurs just doing what they are told. Remember that goofy kid in the MAGA hat? The one that was an evil racist because he laughed at a native cretin that was beating the tom-tom? They ALL tried to kill him by labelling him a racist when he clearly was not. They tried to kill Rittenhouse the same way and meddle in the judicial process by spinning it as a race war issue. They tried to dox the jurors and do the… Read more »
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.”
— Upton Sinclair
Which is why all the real journalism today is done by independents.
“I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords”
Glen
It sounds like you read “What I Saw at the Coup” by Matt Bracken.
In it, a lone gunman puts down a talking head at a ship christening ( I think it was the Harvey Milk).
Her head explodes on an Admirals nice white dress uniform. Being on live TV there was no way to censor it.
That got the ball rolling, and I’ll let whoever wants to read it enjoy the ending.
It’s free online and a quick read.
That said, things were much worse in the story. We’re not quite there yet.
Haven’t read it.. but I will! Thanks for the recommendation!
A nice essay, putting me in the mind of the one Orwell wrote many years ago [1946 to be precise], titled, “Politics and the English Language.” He calls out five categories of linguistic sins, one of which, “meaningless words,” is especially pertinent. Here’s a longish quote worth repeating: “Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like… Read more »
One thing democracy can’t mean as it is used today is representative government.
“tolerance”
“diversity”
“inclusive”
“egalitarian” ALWAYS GOOD!
“mixed-race couple”
“minority”
“immigrant”
“Racist”
“White supremacy”
Couple observations: 1. Though certainly reference to Syme in 1984 as being a clear tangent from this point, Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” is an excellent treatment of this subject. 2. Lack of language is lack of thought. 3. I open my web browser at work this morning, and I encounter on the news agglomeration splash page, via the NYTimes, that GenZ has coined a new word: “Cheugy.” It traces the arc of the proliferation of a word created by a 20 something who said there was no word to describe a person or thing that was trendy… Read more »
LOL…..I see great minds think alike! That Orwell piece was required reading for us grad students by the only prof I had that wasn’t tainted with the Hive’s progressivism.
I hear ya! Though of course Orwell is no prophet, he sometimes pinned the problem like a lepidopterist with a butterfly. I don’t know if you have ever read a piece by CS Lewis, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State,” but it is another one of those tracts that simply nails the modern condition. He makes many brilliant points in the essay, but my favorite is that, in the era of medical tyranny (I mean, dang, he is writing this in the 50s!), because the government views you as sick, they are treating the illness, not you. Thus, they can… Read more »
I don’t agree with his Christianity, but Lewis got so much right!
Faith is not something we need ‘you’ to agree with
Fantastic essay. “On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in’. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants’ ‘science’– they didn’t think much of Hitler’s racial theories or Stalin’s biology. But they can be muzzled.” He… Read more »
” . . . there was no word to describe a person or thing that was trendy but is now out of fashion . . . ”
Groovy.
Far out Infant Phenomenon man
I was at the dealership this morning and your website was blocked for “hate and racism”. You should be proud. You were the only site that I could find that was blocked. I was kind of sad about that. I need to up my game
Pot dealership?
Not car stealership? Say it isn’t so.
“Safe and effective.” That’s all you need to know–now roll up your sleeve for your shot!