The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things. And to speak of them using their true names, that neither our speech nor our thoughts be clouded by those who spill the ink from their pens with the same intent with which a squid squirts ink into the water.
"and they too had a knack for nominative misrepresentation.
the name does not confer the attributes.
but it’s really just the tangled word games of demanding monopsony on meaning because my meaning means what my meaning means to me and don’t you tell me different, meanie!"
Hard to say if my favorite part is your critical thinking, vocabulary or wordsmithing. :~)
I've decided to start the Good Guys Party. It is currently a party of one, espousing the ideology of Good Guyism, to which every one of my personal beliefs and opinions align.
You can join the Good Guys if you align completely with its ideology. That's only reasonable.
However, if you don't belong to the Good Guys, guess what you are?
"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name."
~ Confucius
"Antifa".
Right.
Purported anti-fascists who demand mask and vaccine mandates, a.k.a. medical fascism.
For some time now I've seen the purported difference between progressivism, fascism, socialism, communism, etc., etc., etc., as nothing more than semantic distractions.
All of them are just different flavors of the same shit, which comes directly from the State that they all empower to kill, steal, cage and oppress the rest of us.
These people have inflicted an almost incomprehensible amount of death, destruction, suffering and oppression over the course of centuries.
From over half the 1612 Plymouth colonists starving to death, through the French Revolution when leftist lunatics shouted the oxymoronic liberté, égalité, fraternité while lopping off the heads of innocents and throwing baby aristocrats into bread ovens, to Mao, Stalin and Hitler murdering probably 150,000,000 souls, right up to today in Cuba and North Korea, not to mention the "blue" states which "locked down" their people like gigantic prison camps.
I find it incomprehensible that with this track record, which is undeniable, how any civilized person could continue to be a collectivist of any form whatsoever.
And yet, recently polls showed that a plurality would send the un-jabbed to concentration camps or keep them under house arrest.
These people are the true enemy, along with the State they empower.
They will be our undoing, just as they always have, should we not prevail.
Someone has to say it. All of this "up is down, down is up, good is bad, bad is good" is simply Satanic. It is the denial of reality, truth and even beauty. Our world is in the grip of evil. Not "evil," or some sort of vague concept of "not good," simple, Satanic evil. Outside of prayer, I don't know what can be done to stop it at this point.
Timely post. So many “Newspeak” examples being created by the day, it’s tough to keep track. And Congress voting to give Biden power to expropriate assets of foreign citizens, all because they come from a land which Trusted News™️ decided was henceforth despicable.
Sounds to many like a great idea. Until you become the target 🎯.
When language evolves naturally, there's in increase in nuance and clarity, and an increase in the ability to facilitate understanding between people. When language changes in a way that decreases nuance and clarity, and decreases the ability to facilitate understanding between people, it's because of something that's *not* the natural evolution of language. When conversations fail because people can't agree on the definitions of common words, it's because of something that's *not* the natural evolution of language.
From George Orwell's “1984”:
“How is the Dictionary getting on?” said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.
“Slowly,” said Syme. “I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.”
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.
“The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,” he said. “We’re getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.”
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’?
‘Ungood’ will do just as well -- better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,” he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
“You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,” he said almost sadly.
“Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,” he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. “Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
“Except--” began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped. It had been on the tip of his tongue to say “Except the proles,” but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
“The proles are not human beings,” he said carelessly. “By 2050 -- earlier, probably -- all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron -- they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly.
The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.
Brings to mind the concept of "x justice", whereby justice - a word with a universal meaning in no need of modifiers - is perversely used to legitimate injustice and harm to its targets. Social justice, environmental justice, economic justice etc are all Orwellian terms meaning "the commission of injustice to achieve a goal"...
The cultivation of anti-intellectualism and moral apathy in our badly decayed Western culture has produced a populace a too-large percentage of which is ripe for enlistment into the ranks of goon squads.
It seems only a matter of time before DHS arms them and sends them against dissenters.
A lot of people want to be part of something bigger than themselves, and they want some form of “righteous” inspiration, and they want to exercise power over others.
And they want to go to extremes with all that.
And when a higher authority instructs them to do so, they certainly will.
The left has always held views premised on coercion, be it fascism or socialism, it's the empowerment of the state to do to citizens that which would be deemed illegal to do to each other. Robert A. Heinlein referred to common thieves as "freelance socialists". The only new element of today's varieties is the employment of nullifying the language, essentially taking Orwell's fictional warning and employing it as a manual. Antifa is today's version of the 1930's brown shirts - sheltered by a name capable of fooling only the victims of the propaganda from their fellow fascists of the institutional left, particularly in media and academia.
"surrendering delimitational power to the inhabitants of a self-aggrandizing hallucination riddled with definitional inversions and poisonous pretextual gambits is not the path to reason nor community"
uhhh, gimmee a few minutes...ummm... leave the comment box open another fifteen minutes...another quart of coffee... ok, ok, I got it. Dang that was good. And I will quote with attribute to my friends on the bluer side of the isle just to rile them up, if they get it at all. Thanks for the fun. Now Ctrl-C, paste on FB and hit Post here and there.
‘… the persistent misunderstanding that fascism is a leftist and not a right wing philosophy.‘
Isn’t that the wrong way round? Fascism emerged from Socialism, Mussolini was an ardent Socialist as was Hitler, both used the roots of Socialism, empowerment of the State over the individual, State economic direction, autarky, protectionism.
I've been saying this for a while… Our modern culture lacks any sense of "dharma", by any name.
The Sanskrit word "dharma" has many meanings in English, but one of those meanings translates approximately as "the nature of". ie the nature of fire is to burn - if something doesn't burn, it isn't fire; the nature of water is to quench - if something doesn't quench, it isn't water; and so on. Everything has dharma, which is to say that everything has a nature.
There is a dharma of men. There is a dharma of women. There is a dharma of war. There is a dharma of peace. Everything has its dharma, and re-labelling a thing with a different name does not change its dharma.
And here we are, with no concept of dharma.
• If you question antifa, you're a fascist, because they call themselves "anti fascists".
• If you question Black Lives Matter™, you're a racist, because they call themselves "Black Lives Matter™".
• If you say that sex/gender is a biological construct, you're transphobic, because a man who claims to be a woman calls himself a woman.
• If you question a "vaccine" that doesn't prevent infection, you're "anti-vax", because it's called a "vaccine".
We could spend all day listing the ways in which our culture, hijacked by postmodern, post-Marxist, deconstructionist, critical-theory nonsense has untethered language from meaning. Language is adrift.
We're living in a fantasy world where words mean whatever someone wants them to mean, because peanut butter bicycle pants.
My grandfathers fought the Nazis so that I could be called a Nazi for believing the things my grandfathers believed.
The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things. And to speak of them using their true names, that neither our speech nor our thoughts be clouded by those who spill the ink from their pens with the same intent with which a squid squirts ink into the water.
"and they too had a knack for nominative misrepresentation.
the name does not confer the attributes.
but it’s really just the tangled word games of demanding monopsony on meaning because my meaning means what my meaning means to me and don’t you tell me different, meanie!"
Hard to say if my favorite part is your critical thinking, vocabulary or wordsmithing. :~)
I've decided to start the Good Guys Party. It is currently a party of one, espousing the ideology of Good Guyism, to which every one of my personal beliefs and opinions align.
You can join the Good Guys if you align completely with its ideology. That's only reasonable.
However, if you don't belong to the Good Guys, guess what you are?
Some pertinent wisdom from my Cheshire Cat friend:
“If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does.”
“Never let anyone drive you crazy; it is nearby anyway and the walk is good for you.”
“No one does [play fair] if they think they can get away with it.”
“How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night?”
“Only a few find the way, some don’t recognize it when they do – some… don’t ever want to.”
“How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another.”
“A rose is still a rose, even hidden under different petals.”
“Only the insane equate pain with success.”
"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name."
~ Confucius
"Antifa".
Right.
Purported anti-fascists who demand mask and vaccine mandates, a.k.a. medical fascism.
For some time now I've seen the purported difference between progressivism, fascism, socialism, communism, etc., etc., etc., as nothing more than semantic distractions.
All of them are just different flavors of the same shit, which comes directly from the State that they all empower to kill, steal, cage and oppress the rest of us.
These people have inflicted an almost incomprehensible amount of death, destruction, suffering and oppression over the course of centuries.
From over half the 1612 Plymouth colonists starving to death, through the French Revolution when leftist lunatics shouted the oxymoronic liberté, égalité, fraternité while lopping off the heads of innocents and throwing baby aristocrats into bread ovens, to Mao, Stalin and Hitler murdering probably 150,000,000 souls, right up to today in Cuba and North Korea, not to mention the "blue" states which "locked down" their people like gigantic prison camps.
I find it incomprehensible that with this track record, which is undeniable, how any civilized person could continue to be a collectivist of any form whatsoever.
And yet, recently polls showed that a plurality would send the un-jabbed to concentration camps or keep them under house arrest.
These people are the true enemy, along with the State they empower.
They will be our undoing, just as they always have, should we not prevail.
Someone has to say it. All of this "up is down, down is up, good is bad, bad is good" is simply Satanic. It is the denial of reality, truth and even beauty. Our world is in the grip of evil. Not "evil," or some sort of vague concept of "not good," simple, Satanic evil. Outside of prayer, I don't know what can be done to stop it at this point.
Timely post. So many “Newspeak” examples being created by the day, it’s tough to keep track. And Congress voting to give Biden power to expropriate assets of foreign citizens, all because they come from a land which Trusted News™️ decided was henceforth despicable.
Sounds to many like a great idea. Until you become the target 🎯.
When language evolves naturally, there's in increase in nuance and clarity, and an increase in the ability to facilitate understanding between people. When language changes in a way that decreases nuance and clarity, and decreases the ability to facilitate understanding between people, it's because of something that's *not* the natural evolution of language. When conversations fail because people can't agree on the definitions of common words, it's because of something that's *not* the natural evolution of language.
From George Orwell's “1984”:
“How is the Dictionary getting on?” said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.
“Slowly,” said Syme. “I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.”
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.
“The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,” he said. “We’re getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.”
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’?
‘Ungood’ will do just as well -- better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,” he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
“You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,” he said almost sadly.
“Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,” he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. “Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
“Except--” began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped. It had been on the tip of his tongue to say “Except the proles,” but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
“The proles are not human beings,” he said carelessly. “By 2050 -- earlier, probably -- all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron -- they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly.
The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.
I don't understand how anyone could be misled by "Antifa" -- they are straight-up brownshirts.
Brings to mind the concept of "x justice", whereby justice - a word with a universal meaning in no need of modifiers - is perversely used to legitimate injustice and harm to its targets. Social justice, environmental justice, economic justice etc are all Orwellian terms meaning "the commission of injustice to achieve a goal"...
The cultivation of anti-intellectualism and moral apathy in our badly decayed Western culture has produced a populace a too-large percentage of which is ripe for enlistment into the ranks of goon squads.
It seems only a matter of time before DHS arms them and sends them against dissenters.
A lot of people want to be part of something bigger than themselves, and they want some form of “righteous” inspiration, and they want to exercise power over others.
And they want to go to extremes with all that.
And when a higher authority instructs them to do so, they certainly will.
The left has always held views premised on coercion, be it fascism or socialism, it's the empowerment of the state to do to citizens that which would be deemed illegal to do to each other. Robert A. Heinlein referred to common thieves as "freelance socialists". The only new element of today's varieties is the employment of nullifying the language, essentially taking Orwell's fictional warning and employing it as a manual. Antifa is today's version of the 1930's brown shirts - sheltered by a name capable of fooling only the victims of the propaganda from their fellow fascists of the institutional left, particularly in media and academia.
"surrendering delimitational power to the inhabitants of a self-aggrandizing hallucination riddled with definitional inversions and poisonous pretextual gambits is not the path to reason nor community"
uhhh, gimmee a few minutes...ummm... leave the comment box open another fifteen minutes...another quart of coffee... ok, ok, I got it. Dang that was good. And I will quote with attribute to my friends on the bluer side of the isle just to rile them up, if they get it at all. Thanks for the fun. Now Ctrl-C, paste on FB and hit Post here and there.
‘… the persistent misunderstanding that fascism is a leftist and not a right wing philosophy.‘
Isn’t that the wrong way round? Fascism emerged from Socialism, Mussolini was an ardent Socialist as was Hitler, both used the roots of Socialism, empowerment of the State over the individual, State economic direction, autarky, protectionism.
I've been saying this for a while… Our modern culture lacks any sense of "dharma", by any name.
The Sanskrit word "dharma" has many meanings in English, but one of those meanings translates approximately as "the nature of". ie the nature of fire is to burn - if something doesn't burn, it isn't fire; the nature of water is to quench - if something doesn't quench, it isn't water; and so on. Everything has dharma, which is to say that everything has a nature.
There is a dharma of men. There is a dharma of women. There is a dharma of war. There is a dharma of peace. Everything has its dharma, and re-labelling a thing with a different name does not change its dharma.
And here we are, with no concept of dharma.
• If you question antifa, you're a fascist, because they call themselves "anti fascists".
• If you question Black Lives Matter™, you're a racist, because they call themselves "Black Lives Matter™".
• If you say that sex/gender is a biological construct, you're transphobic, because a man who claims to be a woman calls himself a woman.
• If you question a "vaccine" that doesn't prevent infection, you're "anti-vax", because it's called a "vaccine".
We could spend all day listing the ways in which our culture, hijacked by postmodern, post-Marxist, deconstructionist, critical-theory nonsense has untethered language from meaning. Language is adrift.
We're living in a fantasy world where words mean whatever someone wants them to mean, because peanut butter bicycle pants.