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In my recent post on Covid (12/3/24), I remarked that a calling card of the Left has always been the redefinition of terminology, so that words are transformed into a fundamentally altered, or even opposite, meaning. Revisiting this phenomenon, I was reminded of a story.
One day during the late 1980s, I was sitting in a café in Philadelphia, discussing current affairs with a wise old gentleman who had vast experience in the world of think tanks and public policy. We were lamenting the adoption by the city of some harebrained program championed by the usual nutjob Leftist coalition. We concluded that it was well-nigh impossible to challenge the move in a public forum because all of the keywords associated with the program were ingrained in the hivemind as positive: war on poverty, anti-discrimination, equal rights, empowerment, etc. My interlocutor, with a deep sigh, then proclaimed: “The Left owns the rhetoric.” Never were truer words spoken. We face the same problem today. The components of Leftist ideology are so infused in our language that we hardly notice it, to the degree that we often are unable to formulate an adequate response in our own minds. We become paralyzed, without knowing why. Consider, for example, the controversy surrounding the bathrooms at the Capitol in Washington, DC. A few members of Congress are bravely resisting the Alphabet freak show, and I applaud their efforts. But they are hamstrung by the lexicon itself because they engage in arguments about gender. Until recently, this word was almost exclusively a linguistic term, denoting an attribute of a noun: masculine, feminine, or neuter. When the subject was people (or animals), the operative word was sex. As in male or female. If you argue over “gender,” you have already conceded half the battle. Once this linguistic battle is lost, the door is open to a torrent of twisted Orwellian doublespeak. A good example is the mind-bending term gender-affirming care to describe the genital mutilation of children. A related sleight-of-hand is the use of the third-person plural, they, in place of the grammatically correct singular form, he or she. In addition to being a linguistic atrocity, this usage serves to blur the identification of people as male or female. The language now forces us all to speak of each other as androgynous beings. Chalk up another victory for the Left. Higher culture requires the ability to identify and analyze differences, great and subtle, between people, things, and concepts. This intellectual process used to be called discrimination. We all know what happened to the word. For decades already, noticing differences between people, once obligatory in educated circles, is taboo. A final example, and this one a bit more subtle: The use of the word planet instead of world. I am hearing this more and more. “Everyone on the planet knows that…” “They have the best sausage on the planet” “No one on the planet believes that…” etc. In all cases, up until very recently, the usage would have been “in the world” instead of “on the planet.” Planet denotes a hunk of rock, an inanimate object. It is a favorite word of the Climate-Industrial Complex. In contrast, world denotes people, nations, cultures, etc. A huge difference. When we use planet, we are already sucked halfway into the Green scam, without a single argument being made.
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Over at the Had Enough Therapy? blog, Stuart Schneiderman has composed a concise and incisive exposition on feminism; one of the best short commentaries I have seen on this profound societal malaise. He opens the piece with this gem: “If you reject reality you will never run out of things to complain about.” While you’re there, check out Schneiderman’s other fascinating and enlightening articles.
Following up on my earlier post on Covid (11/30/24), I would like to share a few additional observations.
A calling card of the Left has always been the redefinition of terminology, so that words are transformed into a fundamentally altered, or even opposite, meaning. This tendency went into overdrive during the Covid campaign. For example, the term science. How many times have we heard “the science is settled,” or its variant, “a consensus has been reached among scientists.” This notion has been employed with great dexterity in the Global Warming scam, but in the Covidocracy it reached new (and dangerous) heights. Science is what we, the experts, say it is! And we declare that it is settled! This, of course, is the precise opposite of what science has always been taken to mean: an endless process of hypothesis, proof, new evidence, challenge, debate, new hypothesis, new experiment, etc. It can never be insulated from challenge and revision. If it did, it would be religion, not science. Another case of language rape is the word vaccine. My 1991 Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as: “1: matter or a preparation containing the virus of cowpox in a form used for vaccination 2: a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease." [In other words, what every person in the world thought was a vaccine, before 2020. Here’s the current definition at Merriam-Webster:] "1: a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body's immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease: such as a: an antigenic preparation of a typically inactivated or attenuated pathogenic agent (such as a bacterium or virus) or one of its components or products (such as a protein or toxin)" [So far so good, though they did sneak in “protein or toxin.” But then...] "b: 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)" [There you have it. A vaccine is whatever we say it is. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a few examples of usage are provided, including:] "Moderna's coronavirus vaccine … works by injecting a small piece of mRNA from the coronavirus that codes for the virus' spike protein. … mRNA vaccine spurs the body to produce the spike protein internally. That, in turn, triggers an immune response. —Susie Neilson et al. The revolutionary messenger RNA vaccines that are now available have been over a decade in development. … Messenger RNA enters the cell cytoplasm and produces protein from the spike of the Covid-19 virus. —Thomas F. Cozza Viral vector vaccines, another recent type of vaccine, are similar to DNA and RNA vaccines, but the virus's genetic information is housed in an attenuated virus (unrelated to the disease-causing virus) that helps to promote host cell fusion and entry. —Priya Kaur” Good grief. A related phenomenon is the abrupt about-face on a point of ideology. Consider the controversy surrounding the views of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on medical issues. The Left is up in arms over his nomination as Secretary of Health. But within recent memory, our Progressive masters were advocating a very similar approach. Not all that long ago, the Left would have asserted:
Well, all that went out the window when the Left realized that the Medical-Industrial Complex could be harnessed to its agenda. Go ahead, folks, take those pills and injections, eat the fake meat, wear a mask that traps your waste matter, whatever; it’s all safe and effective. Big Pharma has joined the pantheon of heroes, alongside our intrepid medical personnel, who will treat you at the hospital, even if you have the dreaded, unspeakable plague. In the immortal words of George Orwell, we have always been at war with Eastasia. “Let us not be deceived! Time marches forward; we’d like to believe that everything in it marches forward, that the development is also one that moves forward. The most level-headed are led astray by this illusion … ‘Mankind’ does not advance; it does not even exist. The overall aspect is that of a tremendous experimental laboratory in which a few successes are scored, scattered throughout all ages, while there are untold failures, and all order, logic, union, and obligingness are lacking.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, circa 1885 |
Dystopian literatureWelcome to the blog! While you're here, check out the six dystopian novels by Gary Wolf. His latest is The Cubist Supremacy. 
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