This fellow won my support when he objected to putting the word “my” in front of the word “truth.” Good man!
I think I want to deputize this dude with power to do some grammar-policing. If it goes well — I mean, if he horsewhips a few malapropist punks and torches the offices of a few newspapers whose editors failed to catch swapped homonyms — then we should give him all the armed forces that they improperly gave to OSHA and the IRS a few years back, and set him loose like an avenging angel.
I don’t think he’s a Pedantic Bore, or even a Pedantic Boar. I wish he had some tusks, metaphorically or even literally, with which to gore and maul the abusers of my mother tongue.
I think this video is an overly-meek response to the ongoing collapse of civilization. (It happens first in certain minds, and then in the culture when the culture fails to have a proper immune-response to the collapse of those minds, but opts instead to join them.)
I want to live in a society worthy of being called a society. I want my Oxford comma, dammit.
So of course I want people to spell things correctly, and to be slightly ashamed of themselves whenever they’ve failed to do so. (Hell, I always am, and why should I be the only one carrying the load of culture-preserving scruples?)
I want to get back good writing style, and teach it to the next generation over-and-against whatever’s the latest exhibitionism from a Tik-Tok Thot. I want schoolkids who can freely toggle between the style of Tom Wolfe and the style of Ernest Hemingway, and who, upon opening their mouths, can’t help speaking with the finesse and authority of a Thomas Sowell or a Douglas Murray.
Not everyone will have the language facility of such heroes, I grant. But I’m tired of having half the population sounding like a lobotomy post-op on cyclobenzaprine.
Critics will use the term “Grammar Nazis.”
Nonsense. We’re nothing like the Nazis, because they used inane lies to propel minds into insanity; whereas we vehemently oppose the deconstruction of the true, the good, and the beautiful, in order that sanity might be restored. They were genocidal barbarians, the Vandals and Huns and half-crazed Visigoths; but we are the watchmen on the walls, who give warning to the city, lest it fall. They were a particularly destructive form of satanism, broadly construed; but we are precisely and pointedly champions of the light, defending all that is good in the created order, which was created through the Word, and its goodness comes from the Author of all good things.
So, let’s unfetter this young content-creator to crusade — yes, I said crusade — against the abuse of language. (I think we need not fear that fame will go to his head; he looks too much like a less-gaunt echo of Homely Charles III in his youth to become much of a celebrity.)
And not that I place much hope in such a crusade. Like the original crusades, I’ve no doubt this one will be an overly-hesitant, sparse, well-intentioned but poorly-implemented, sometimes disastrously off-target, and altogether insufficient response to an overwhelming and wicked assault on civilization.
But let’s fight the decline anyway.
I don’t know about my country anymore, much; but perhaps it’s slightly dulce et decorum to rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Here is a useless something I didn’t know. I was reading this morning Statues at Large for 1916-1917 and came across this one:
An Act For the restoration of annuities to the Medawakanton and Wahpakoota (Santee) Sioux Indians, declared forfeited by the Act of February sixteenth, eighteen hundred and sixty-three.
Didn’t know we revoked their annuities for the 1863 Santee uprising and didn’t know we restored them specifically excluding any still living participants of said uprising.
1984 and brave new world were not supposed to be how to manuals, I imagine Huxley saw the latter as an ideal, this technocratic world where reason has devolved into a world of overseers where every function of a free society has atrophied,
when words mean the opposite of what they are, when a woman is per our Demand Justice ordered pic, not a question of biology but cognition, where the Truth is Dezinforma and Dezinforma is truth, where there are shrines to a petty street criminal,
Just another open-thread comment about something I read. Waaaay off topic. Nothing to do with politics. Much more interesting than you might guess from my quick comment.
In 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted and buried the Roman town of Herculaneum. Between 1752 and 1753, the town was excavated, and about 800 scrolls were found in a large villa. Attempts to open the scrolls resulted in their destruction, and only 270 are left. The villa’s main library hasn’t been excavated and may contain many more scrolls. Our understanding of Roman literature, philosophy, and history is based on a very small number of primary sources, so reading these scrolls could be important even to nonspecialists.
Two recent articles have been published describing how the Herculaneum scrolls are now being deciphered without unrolling them. This is a high-tech process involving computer tomography and artificial intelligence. The multi-disciplinary research team was assembled in a unique way, and the approach might offer an alternative to the current moribund lockstep of government funding.
A fascinating angle I gathered on what happened to Pompeii was in Robert Harris’s novel part of his Roman arc that ended with Conspirata, it plays more like a noir set in the shadows of the eruption, this was to recover from the bout of Blair derangement that was present in the Ghost, based largely on the writing of Pliny the Elder, the story concerns the aqueduct engineer that notices things are amiss, thats why there are echoes of ChinaTown, to my reading, it was rumored that Roman Polanski would write the screenplay for the film, that would be filmed but that was not to be, instead we got a terrible schlock fest from Paul WS Andersen,
I have never understood why people use the word irregardless instead of the word regardless.
As far as I know, they both have the same meaning and can be used in the same way.
The video may have addressed this, but have not yet watched it.
Iconic would lead my current list.
Fowler calls them “worsened words.” He cites something like this (from memory): “He turned in the saddle and with one shot he literally decimated his opponent.”
But can “literally” be criticized as misused of one uses it as Our President, the Sharpest and Most Mentally Alert Man in Washington uses it?
miguel cervantes:
I don’t know what you mean when you say that Huxley saw Brave New World as an “ideal.” He saw it as a dystopia where liberty had been extinguished.
Here is another:
Joint Resolution Authorizing the Secretary of War to loan one thousand tents and one thousand cots for the use of the encampment of the United Confederate Veterans to be held at Birmingham, Alabama in May, nineteen hundred and sixteen.
Great content, but listening to and looking at these guys gives me a headache.
Or maybe I just have a headache.
_________
There were plenty of prescriptive, “language maven” books in the Seventies and Eighties by Edwin Newman, John Simon, William Safire, Jacques Barzun, and the Underground Grammarian. Since then people have become more “laissez-faire” about language. That’s not going to change with more and more people writing online and linguists taking a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive approach.
The one that is causing me to gnash my teeth and curse now is “iconic.” I guess its current use could be filed under “bleached,” but as much as that it’s the sheer stupidity with which it’s used. The worst one I’ve come across:
Arby’s Is Bringing Back One of It’s Most Iconic Deals
Yes, the misplaced apostrophe is in the original. Perfect touch. If you want to luxuriate in the misery, here is my longer complaint:
Just look at how Huxley had them ‘create’ their elevator operators.
He knew when he wrote that book that utopia was always only meant for the ‘elites’.
@Mac – agreed and it popped a memory that made me laugh. In one comic forum I posted that ‘iconic’ meant ‘what the writer wrote today’. Got LOLs and hate. 🙂
I imagine Huxley saw [“Brave New World”] as an ideal, this technocratic world where reason has devolved into a world of overseers where every function of a free society has atrophied,
Miguel cervantes:
You do not understand Uncle Aldous.
Read “Island,” his last book, which he wrote as his Last Will and Testament — a counterbalance to “Brave New World” — about the world he truly wanted to see
Not utopia, he didn’t believe in utopia, but a world which was a work in progress, bringing out the best in humanity.
“Island” changed my life.
I have two.
1. The word “Hero” is grossly overused. Just being in the Military does not make you a Hero, or being a Police Officer or Firefighter.
2. Per my 9th Grade English Teacher, Mrs. Faulkner (not sure of the spelling – it was a very long time ago ) “the fact that”, no it is the fact so “the fact” am old means nothing.
I would like to add the overuse of the word “perfect” by young people.
@Cornflour – Thanks for links. Very informative.
Re: “Brave New World”
John the Savage in “Brave New World” dies at the end … but let Chat tell it because I’m lazy:
________________________________________
In Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” the character known as the Savage, or John, dies at the end of the novel. His death is a result of the intense conflict between his values, which are influenced by Shakespearean ideals and the teachings of the Native American tribe he grew up with, and the values of the highly controlled, technologically advanced, and hedonistic society he encounters when he leaves the reservation.
The Savage is deeply disturbed by the superficiality, lack of individuality, and absence of true emotions in the World State. He becomes a symbol of resistance and an object of fascination for the citizens, but this attention only exacerbates his sense of isolation and alienation. After a series of traumatic events, including the loss of his mother and a violent confrontation with the citizens, the Savage retreats to a lighthouse to live in solitude.
In the end, overwhelmed by guilt, shame, and despair, and unable to reconcile his beliefs with the world around him, the Savage takes his own life. His death serves as a tragic conclusion to the novel, highlighting the incompatibility between the values of the individual and the demands of a conformist society. It also serves as a commentary on the potential dangers of a society that prioritizes technological advancement and societal control over individual freedom and emotional depth.
I included hitchens foreward on another thread
I have never understood why people use the word irregardless instead of the word regardless.
–JohnTyler
My grandmother used to say “irregardless.” I think she knew better, but, as an Oklahoma gal when Oklahoma was still a territory, she enjoyed appearing down home and less literate than she was.
She often said, “anyhoo.”
She was a fiend at the Scrabble board.
@Mac:
I’m happy to discover your blog; thank you.
I agree about “iconic,” and posted a reply just now.
I look up words in an online dictionary because of the way it is used. I check to see if another meaning has been added to the list of options. Most of the time, there is a new option.
I ignore some typos in comments since I think they are errors related to voice to text translation or fat fingers on a small phone hitting the wrong key. Still, I think people need to proofread their work.
It was interesting to have this open thread video right after the post on Trump and the “trumped-up” charges.
Recently I’ve mentioned Joan of Arc and Aldous Huxley, two individuals who changed my life from afar. My eyes fill up with gratitude.
Who changed your life? Doesn’t have to be historical.
Cornflour:
Thank you for the city-journal link.
I came here to post the same Free Press article https://www.thefp.com/p/luke-farritor-vesuvius-challenge-scrolls-rome
with this “The deciphered text was an Epicurean work of criticism, likely by the scholar Philodemus, who lived in the first century BCE. In it, Philodemus criticizes the Stoics, who, he writes, “have nothing to say about pleasure.” As the competition organizers note, this line “seems familiar to us, and we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.””
I am interested to see more of what they discover.
If I posted the link incorrectly, just type “Studio C Captain Literally” in a YouTube search. Hope you enjoy it!
Cornflour @12:49pm,
Agreed. Huge, huge news! Who knows what could be on those scrolls? Julius Caesar’s father in law’s library was likely full of fascinating volumes. The iterative, open approach to solving this mystery is wonderful and using the attraction of large, monetary prizes to attract hundreds of thousands of manhours of free labor is brilliant, fun and harking back to an old tradition that bore great fruit in the past.
I commented on the AI Vesuvius scrolls a week or so ago. No biggie. I don’t read all comments as conscientiously as I might either.,
I beat the drum on AI so hard, because I see it as The Story right now, more so than Trump, Democrats, Russia, China or Iran.
It’s coming at us so fast. For now Chat and its current kin are going to be a utility, taken for granted. You turn on the tap in your sink and water comes out. You turn on a Chat on your computer and intelligence comes out.
But meanwhile the Chats will be watching, training, growing and getting smarter.
I have no idea where this takes us. However, the dangers are real, yet we are rushing heedlessly towards some AI Omega, while we regulate sandwiches sold at the corner deli more strictly than this technology which could be our extinction event.
“It’s great to be here in North Philistine,” said Biden to a small crowd of gathered fake supporters. “I’m sorry for your loss. I understand how it feels. I lost my son in a train derailment. Not a joke.”
huxley,
“Who changed your life?”
My High School Business Law instructor
George Boole
The Lovely Mrs. Firefly
Andrew Klavan
Rufus:
Wonderful!
I’d love to hear more, though your discretion on The Lovely Mrs. Firefly I would entirely understand.
My high school math teacher gave me the only useful advice I received in those years.
_______________________________
It’s important to find work you enjoy.
_______________________________
He was a hulking linebacker who played college ball for Northwestern, blew out a knee, then taught math and coached football.
I finally took the time to watch the video “Words We’ve Ruined,” and was happy to learn something new: there are words that have been skunked, and there are words that have been bleached. Vivid.
Even though I know it’s wrong, my first assumption is that everything on YouTube has a leftist slant, but this video completely ignored the baleful effects of politics and ideology on language. Why? Unfortunately, now I’m suspicious of the author’s motives. Oh well.
For what it’s worth, my pet peeve is the recent abuse of the word “privilege.”
huxley on February 17, 2024 at 7:57 pm said:
I commented on the AI Vesuvius scrolls a week or so ago. No biggie. I don’t read all comments as conscientiously as I might either.,
__________________________________________________
huxley:
Sorry I missed your comment from last week. If you linked to an article you thought was good, then I’d like to read it. Of course, if you don’t have it at hand, then please don’t bother.
Thanks.
huxley,
My High School Business Law instructor was a practicing lawyer who taught a few hours a week at my High School for fun and side money. I was a bright kid who loved to learn but all the adult men I saw were blue collar, except for a few teachers who, frankly, didn’t seem manly. Although my Business Law teacher was not a hulking linebacker, he was an example that a man could wear a tie to work and still be a man. And he made College sound worthwhile. He wasn’t demanding or strict, but he was not an easy grader. He left it up to us to determine if we were going to work hard enough to do well. He was legitimately angry when I scored a 100 on the final exam. He tried to write his exams so 100s were not possible and I was the first (possibly only) student to do it.
I doubt I would have gone to University had I not met him.
I like and sometimes admire Christopher Hitchens, but that was one gasbag of an essay, mostly name and fact dropping. I was interested to discover that Huxley was a teacher at Eton and had Eric Blair (George Orwell) as a student.
The essay was Christopher Hitchens at his worst, just steamrolling the reader with innuendos and nibbles from his Oxford buffet table, rambling in his hyper-intellectual, semi-coherent way fueled by Johnnie Walker Black, while demanding the reader be impressed.
Aldous Huxley was far from perfect, but as far as I’m concerned Hitchens hadn’t a clue.
Hitchens was far too busy posing as a peacock and assassinating Huxley to say much of anything about “Brave New World.”
I have never understood why people use the word irregardless instead of the word regardless.
huxley in reply:
My grandmother used to say “irregardless.” I think she knew better, but, as an Oklahoma gal when Oklahoma was still a territory, she enjoyed appearing down home and less literate than she was. She often said, “anyhoo.”
Born and raised in New England, I said “irregardless.” My saying so drove my mother up the wall. She was an Okie who left the state to get a STEM graduate degree. I don’t know where I picked it up. I doubt I did so from visiting Oklahoma.
The only person I recall saying “anyhoo” was my roommate my freshman year in college. He was from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He said it for effect.
My Okie grandmother said “baching it,” for a bachelor living on his own. I ran across the phrase in Willa Cather’s My Antonia.
cornflour
For what it’s worth, my pet peeve is the recent abuse of the word “privilege.”
Agreed. I once ran across a discussion at Johnathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy blog about a speech some bigshot had made at the Lakeside School in Seattle. A black student who attended Lakeside made it a point to repeatedly state in the comments, “check your privilege.” Given the elite, privileged nature of the Lakeside School- Bill Gates is a graduate- it is ironic for a student at that school to tell others to “check your privilege.” But the student was only repeating what had been taught.
Looks like “Biden” is inching closer to the war “he” so deeply desires (Part n, and counting)….
TIME TO BE ARMED AND ANGRY AND DEMAND MASS ARRESTS OF THESE ENEMIES OF AMERICA.
The opening portion Mike Benz lengthy talk with Carlson may be read here, transcribed via RealClearPolitics. In the middle of reading/re-listening finds edits and truncations, however.
There is a good deal of internet history shared here to foreground the bombshell revelations toward the latter third of the interview.
It is didactic and pedagogic and faintly superior: indeed you might say it was the tone of voice of an Etonian schoolmaster. It is also somewhat contradictory and even self-defeating. Clearly, Huxley disdained socialism and the idea of equality: why then give the name of Bernard Marx to the only dissident in his awful system? And why call one of the few natural and spontaneous girls Lenina? This is stodgy and heavy rather than ironic, and it becomes absurd when we meet an oversexed little child named Polly Trotsky in the opening chapters.
It seems like Hitchens was expecting Huxley to be more straightforwardly and consistently polemical, whereas Huxley wasn’t afraid to be (or couldn’t help being) a little playful and twee. It was after all the age of Winnie the Pooh, Evelyn Waugh, and Ronald Firbank. Many a British writer was tolerant of — even in love with — silliness. Yet it’s Hitchens who accuses Huxley of being too didactic.
I remember Hitchens’s bookchat articles in “The Atlantic,” and alway wondered if they were anything serious or just the usual cliches of British literary opinion repackaged for the Yanks. I’m still not sure, but I suspect it was the latter.
I have often suspected very much the same sort of things you say about Christopher Hitchens. Specifically, your paragraph beginning “The essay was…”. Well said.
I say “suspected” but I was fairly convinced by his Atlantic review of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which was chock full of functionally irrelevant anti-Catholic and anti-Thomas-More jibes: basically just high-toned snark.
That was in the latter days of my subscribing to The Atlantic, when it was in the process of tipping far enough to the left (broadly speaking) as not to be worth the bother, never mind the money.
TJ: thanks for highlighting the Mike Benz interview on this thread. You beat me to it. Full version here:
Speaking of delusional…
…this is breathtakingly sick!
“NATO’s New Mission: Peace Through Censorship” [and massive, systematic brainwashing]— https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/natos-new-mission-peace-through-censorship
Orwell has effectively been supplanted…
…as one begins to understand the Putin-“Biden” nexus (axis?) more clearly….
RE: Catastrophic population declines in East Asia.
As I’ve written here recently, contrary to the decade’s long worth of warnings by some supposed experts that we are in danger from world-wide over population, we are actually in the midst of the collapse of birth rates and population numbers in a great many countries among the developed nations of the West and, in addition, these population declines are especially catastrophic in East Asia—in China, Japan, and in South Korea.
Peter Zeihan is predicting that China’s population will suffer a tremendous decline by the end of the next decade, with even worse to come, statistics point to Japan being in the midst of a dramatic population decline, and at 0.8 or even less (2.1 is the replacement birthrate at which a country’s population will just remain static) South Korea reportedly has the lowest birth rate in the world.
These gigantic demographic declines have a myriad of consequences, none of them good.
Not only is there a web of many social and political consequences, but these consequences are also economic as well, as steadily shrinking younger, working, tax-paying population cohorts are called upon to support cohorts comprised of an ever increasing number of the non-working elderly, who require increasingly greater amounts of expensive health care.
Moreover, the catastrophic population declines in these three East Asian countries are also apparently irreversible, with Japan, for instance, having spent a reported $300 billion dollars over the last several years in efforts to increase the Japanese birth rate, but with no success.
What risky courses of action might a country–facing a guaranteed near future and radical decline in it’s population and, thus, in it’s economy, it’s capabilities, and it’s influence in the World–contemplate and do while it still could?
Looking over the situation in these three East Asian countries, it appears that in addition to various economic developments, one of the main factors in driving such catastrophic population declines are the particular, rigid social and cultural structures of each one of these countries.
Thus, for instance, Japan is–for all intents and purposes—racially 100% Japanese, but is not going to allow the entry of great numbers of non-Japanese “foreigners” to immigrate to Japan as a way to alleviate their population decline.*
Snow on The Pine-yes. I periodically follow Zeihan, and on China in particular.
He does get thing wrong— for instance, with Putin’s war in Ukraine, he expected Russian pipelines to collapse from winter freezing waters pressuring and busting the pipes. And either it didn’t happen or it happened too little to stanch their creative Mass oil export business.
Therefore, Zeihan’s medium and long term judgements — unlike his near-term estimates — are more reliable, I think
Snow writes “Peter Zeihan is predicting that China’s population will suffer a tremendous decline by the end of the next decade, with even worse to come.”
Chinese demo pressures are worsened by post pandemic economic collapse, while Xi has become the reigning worst totalitarian ruler, who’s too insulated as a ruler to get course correction from any contrary opinion. Thus China is now inflexible, running on a bad autopilot.
.
Xi’s control freak rulership might end up breaking China back into its traditional regions. At present, it is dominated by the Han from North Central China. But economic weakness or decline from mal-investment could see the re-emergence of coastal trading China versus the interior, perhaps along ethnic lines.
No one talks about it. But during the Trump years, China loomed large as threatening rival and dangerous competitor, aiming at world dominance through productivity and the Belt and Road indentured servitude development program. Now, Italy has rejected B&R, and China is too fiscally distressed to keep its powerful global ambitions alive.
That leaves Taiwan — Will Xi roll the dice? And gamble on a blockade to starve her out? It may work as a domestic national destiny move, over the next years of this decade.
It was a huge readjustment we’ve seen play out here, to see the Chinese as an increasingly dangerous threat to US security. Now, with population decline already well underway and one-third of the economy mired in unsustainable debt and Chinese employment failing to deliver, generating a dangerous army of young and unemployed men, the segment that’s most dangerous to political stability — the sudden change in her perceived fortunes means the US is gaining breathing room.
New calculations about the her future role and ability to achieve Xi’s grandiose ambitions put almost everything into reverse,
And given our unsustainable debt, with One-Trillion dollar debt service expected to be larger than Defense spending this year — strategically, we need this break.
And this is the knock-on change no one talks about — yet. Perhaps later in the Presidential campaign this year?
I agree with Zeihan that Southeast Asia’s one billion person market will be the best frontier economic story for the next decade. It’s also where the young can best pursue their ambitions for fortune.
Oops, I believe that the number for Japanese government spending trying to reverse their decline was actually $300 million, not billion.
Still, a whole hell of a lot of money, and their failure an indicator of just how intractable this problem is.
At first glance, you’d think that if you set up a program, offered a substantial payment for each child born and, thereafter, all sorts of financial and other support as a child moves through his schooling and grows to adulthood, that people would jump at the chance to have children, and plenty of them, but, apparently–given all of the forces operative in the Japanese socio-cultural and economic environment–in the entire situation–government programs and propaganda are just not able to motivate people.
People’s hearts are just not in it anymore, and there is apparently a massive loss of what might be termed “civilizational confidence,” and, as side effects, all sorts of what I see as bizarre cultural trends–dwindling marriage, sexual activity, and child bearing, yet, “love hotels” everywhere, the great popularity of hyper violent anime, young people who stay in their rooms and never leave them, fascination with cutesy, infantile cartoon characters, etc.
Oh, and this is just the tip of the iceberg…. (OTOH, icebergs are generally WHITE, i.e., if they’re not bluish or dark grayish and so can be ignored, reviled, canceled, etc….)
RE: East Asian population declines
Can anything be done?
Could a radical disruption of the web of current constraining socioeconomic and political systems in these countries enable these countries to again grow in population?
And, if so, just how radical would such disruption have to be to be effective?
Leave a Reply
HTML tags allowed in your
comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
This fellow won my support when he objected to putting the word “my” in front of the word “truth.” Good man!
I think I want to deputize this dude with power to do some grammar-policing. If it goes well — I mean, if he horsewhips a few malapropist punks and torches the offices of a few newspapers whose editors failed to catch swapped homonyms — then we should give him all the armed forces that they improperly gave to OSHA and the IRS a few years back, and set him loose like an avenging angel.
I don’t think he’s a Pedantic Bore, or even a Pedantic Boar. I wish he had some tusks, metaphorically or even literally, with which to gore and maul the abusers of my mother tongue.
I think this video is an overly-meek response to the ongoing collapse of civilization. (It happens first in certain minds, and then in the culture when the culture fails to have a proper immune-response to the collapse of those minds, but opts instead to join them.)
I want to live in a society worthy of being called a society. I want my Oxford comma, dammit.
So of course I want people to spell things correctly, and to be slightly ashamed of themselves whenever they’ve failed to do so. (Hell, I always am, and why should I be the only one carrying the load of culture-preserving scruples?)
I want to get back good writing style, and teach it to the next generation over-and-against whatever’s the latest exhibitionism from a Tik-Tok Thot. I want schoolkids who can freely toggle between the style of Tom Wolfe and the style of Ernest Hemingway, and who, upon opening their mouths, can’t help speaking with the finesse and authority of a Thomas Sowell or a Douglas Murray.
Not everyone will have the language facility of such heroes, I grant. But I’m tired of having half the population sounding like a lobotomy post-op on cyclobenzaprine.
Critics will use the term “Grammar Nazis.”
Nonsense. We’re nothing like the Nazis, because they used inane lies to propel minds into insanity; whereas we vehemently oppose the deconstruction of the true, the good, and the beautiful, in order that sanity might be restored. They were genocidal barbarians, the Vandals and Huns and half-crazed Visigoths; but we are the watchmen on the walls, who give warning to the city, lest it fall. They were a particularly destructive form of satanism, broadly construed; but we are precisely and pointedly champions of the light, defending all that is good in the created order, which was created through the Word, and its goodness comes from the Author of all good things.
So, let’s unfetter this young content-creator to crusade — yes, I said crusade — against the abuse of language. (I think we need not fear that fame will go to his head; he looks too much like a less-gaunt echo of Homely Charles III in his youth to become much of a celebrity.)
And not that I place much hope in such a crusade. Like the original crusades, I’ve no doubt this one will be an overly-hesitant, sparse, well-intentioned but poorly-implemented, sometimes disastrously off-target, and altogether insufficient response to an overwhelming and wicked assault on civilization.
But let’s fight the decline anyway.
I don’t know about my country anymore, much; but perhaps it’s slightly dulce et decorum to rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Here is a useless something I didn’t know. I was reading this morning Statues at Large for 1916-1917 and came across this one:
An Act For the restoration of annuities to the Medawakanton and Wahpakoota (Santee) Sioux Indians, declared forfeited by the Act of February sixteenth, eighteen hundred and sixty-three.
Didn’t know we revoked their annuities for the 1863 Santee uprising and didn’t know we restored them specifically excluding any still living participants of said uprising.
1984 and brave new world were not supposed to be how to manuals, I imagine Huxley saw the latter as an ideal, this technocratic world where reason has devolved into a world of overseers where every function of a free society has atrophied,
when words mean the opposite of what they are, when a woman is per our Demand Justice ordered pic, not a question of biology but cognition, where the Truth is Dezinforma and Dezinforma is truth, where there are shrines to a petty street criminal,
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/70622.html#comments
Just another open-thread comment about something I read. Waaaay off topic. Nothing to do with politics. Much more interesting than you might guess from my quick comment.
In 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted and buried the Roman town of Herculaneum. Between 1752 and 1753, the town was excavated, and about 800 scrolls were found in a large villa. Attempts to open the scrolls resulted in their destruction, and only 270 are left. The villa’s main library hasn’t been excavated and may contain many more scrolls. Our understanding of Roman literature, philosophy, and history is based on a very small number of primary sources, so reading these scrolls could be important even to nonspecialists.
Two recent articles have been published describing how the Herculaneum scrolls are now being deciphered without unrolling them. This is a high-tech process involving computer tomography and artificial intelligence. The multi-disciplinary research team was assembled in a unique way, and the approach might offer an alternative to the current moribund lockstep of government funding.
Anyway, here are links to the two articles.
“Unlocking Antiquity” by Nicholas Wade
http://tinyurl.com/yc6t3tf7
“The 22-Year-Old Who Unlocked the Secrets of Ancient Rome” by Julia Steinberg
http://tinyurl.com/ymk2nts6
A fascinating angle I gathered on what happened to Pompeii was in Robert Harris’s novel part of his Roman arc that ended with Conspirata, it plays more like a noir set in the shadows of the eruption, this was to recover from the bout of Blair derangement that was present in the Ghost, based largely on the writing of Pliny the Elder, the story concerns the aqueduct engineer that notices things are amiss, thats why there are echoes of ChinaTown, to my reading, it was rumored that Roman Polanski would write the screenplay for the film, that would be filmed but that was not to be, instead we got a terrible schlock fest from Paul WS Andersen,
I have never understood why people use the word irregardless instead of the word regardless.
As far as I know, they both have the same meaning and can be used in the same way.
The video may have addressed this, but have not yet watched it.
Iconic would lead my current list.
Fowler calls them “worsened words.” He cites something like this (from memory): “He turned in the saddle and with one shot he literally decimated his opponent.”
But can “literally” be criticized as misused of one uses it as Our President, the Sharpest and Most Mentally Alert Man in Washington uses it?
miguel cervantes:
I don’t know what you mean when you say that Huxley saw Brave New World as an “ideal.” He saw it as a dystopia where liberty had been extinguished.
Here is another:
Joint Resolution Authorizing the Secretary of War to loan one thousand tents and one thousand cots for the use of the encampment of the United Confederate Veterans to be held at Birmingham, Alabama in May, nineteen hundred and sixteen.
Great content, but listening to and looking at these guys gives me a headache.
Or maybe I just have a headache.
_________
There were plenty of prescriptive, “language maven” books in the Seventies and Eighties by Edwin Newman, John Simon, William Safire, Jacques Barzun, and the Underground Grammarian. Since then people have become more “laissez-faire” about language. That’s not going to change with more and more people writing online and linguists taking a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive approach.
another analogue to current events
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Tremenda_Corte
R.C.: I applaud.
The one that is causing me to gnash my teeth and curse now is “iconic.” I guess its current use could be filed under “bleached,” but as much as that it’s the sheer stupidity with which it’s used. The worst one I’ve come across:
Arby’s Is Bringing Back One of It’s Most Iconic Deals
Yes, the misplaced apostrophe is in the original. Perfect touch. If you want to luxuriate in the misery, here is my longer complaint:
https://www.lightondarkwater.com/2023/07/worst-use-of-iconic.html
Re Brave New World:
Just look at how Huxley had them ‘create’ their elevator operators.
He knew when he wrote that book that utopia was always only meant for the ‘elites’.
@Mac – agreed and it popped a memory that made me laugh. In one comic forum I posted that ‘iconic’ meant ‘what the writer wrote today’. Got LOLs and hate. 🙂
I imagine Huxley saw [“Brave New World”] as an ideal, this technocratic world where reason has devolved into a world of overseers where every function of a free society has atrophied,
Miguel cervantes:
You do not understand Uncle Aldous.
Read “Island,” his last book, which he wrote as his Last Will and Testament — a counterbalance to “Brave New World” — about the world he truly wanted to see
Not utopia, he didn’t believe in utopia, but a world which was a work in progress, bringing out the best in humanity.
“Island” changed my life.
I have two.
1. The word “Hero” is grossly overused. Just being in the Military does not make you a Hero, or being a Police Officer or Firefighter.
2. Per my 9th Grade English Teacher, Mrs. Faulkner (not sure of the spelling – it was a very long time ago ) “the fact that”, no it is the fact so “the fact” am old means nothing.
I would like to add the overuse of the word “perfect” by young people.
@Cornflour – Thanks for links. Very informative.
Re: “Brave New World”
John the Savage in “Brave New World” dies at the end … but let Chat tell it because I’m lazy:
________________________________________
In Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” the character known as the Savage, or John, dies at the end of the novel. His death is a result of the intense conflict between his values, which are influenced by Shakespearean ideals and the teachings of the Native American tribe he grew up with, and the values of the highly controlled, technologically advanced, and hedonistic society he encounters when he leaves the reservation.
The Savage is deeply disturbed by the superficiality, lack of individuality, and absence of true emotions in the World State. He becomes a symbol of resistance and an object of fascination for the citizens, but this attention only exacerbates his sense of isolation and alienation. After a series of traumatic events, including the loss of his mother and a violent confrontation with the citizens, the Savage retreats to a lighthouse to live in solitude.
In the end, overwhelmed by guilt, shame, and despair, and unable to reconcile his beliefs with the world around him, the Savage takes his own life. His death serves as a tragic conclusion to the novel, highlighting the incompatibility between the values of the individual and the demands of a conformist society. It also serves as a commentary on the potential dangers of a society that prioritizes technological advancement and societal control over individual freedom and emotional depth.
I included hitchens foreward on another thread
I have never understood why people use the word irregardless instead of the word regardless.
–JohnTyler
My grandmother used to say “irregardless.” I think she knew better, but, as an Oklahoma gal when Oklahoma was still a territory, she enjoyed appearing down home and less literate than she was.
She often said, “anyhoo.”
She was a fiend at the Scrabble board.
@Mac:
I’m happy to discover your blog; thank you.
I agree about “iconic,” and posted a reply just now.
I included hitchens foreward on another thread
Miguel cervantes:
And…?
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/02/pierre_poilievre_leader_of_canadas_conservative_party_once_again_makes_fools_of_liberals.html
I look up words in an online dictionary because of the way it is used. I check to see if another meaning has been added to the list of options. Most of the time, there is a new option.
I ignore some typos in comments since I think they are errors related to voice to text translation or fat fingers on a small phone hitting the wrong key. Still, I think people need to proofread their work.
It was interesting to have this open thread video right after the post on Trump and the “trumped-up” charges.
Recently I’ve mentioned Joan of Arc and Aldous Huxley, two individuals who changed my life from afar. My eyes fill up with gratitude.
Who changed your life? Doesn’t have to be historical.
Cornflour:
Thank you for the city-journal link.
I came here to post the same Free Press article https://www.thefp.com/p/luke-farritor-vesuvius-challenge-scrolls-rome
with this “The deciphered text was an Epicurean work of criticism, likely by the scholar Philodemus, who lived in the first century BCE. In it, Philodemus criticizes the Stoics, who, he writes, “have nothing to say about pleasure.” As the competition organizers note, this line “seems familiar to us, and we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.””
I am interested to see more of what they discover.
Here is more info about the Vesuvius Challenge
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/vesuvius-challenge-ai-herculaneum-scrolls-b27c2e30
https://scrollprize.org
Fascinating.
Studio C has a great skit about returning “literally” to its original usage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jh4Mpgbi4A
If I posted the link incorrectly, just type “Studio C Captain Literally” in a YouTube search. Hope you enjoy it!
Cornflour @12:49pm,
Agreed. Huge, huge news! Who knows what could be on those scrolls? Julius Caesar’s father in law’s library was likely full of fascinating volumes. The iterative, open approach to solving this mystery is wonderful and using the attraction of large, monetary prizes to attract hundreds of thousands of manhours of free labor is brilliant, fun and harking back to an old tradition that bore great fruit in the past.
I commented on the AI Vesuvius scrolls a week or so ago. No biggie. I don’t read all comments as conscientiously as I might either.,
I beat the drum on AI so hard, because I see it as The Story right now, more so than Trump, Democrats, Russia, China or Iran.
It’s coming at us so fast. For now Chat and its current kin are going to be a utility, taken for granted. You turn on the tap in your sink and water comes out. You turn on a Chat on your computer and intelligence comes out.
But meanwhile the Chats will be watching, training, growing and getting smarter.
I have no idea where this takes us. However, the dangers are real, yet we are rushing heedlessly towards some AI Omega, while we regulate sandwiches sold at the corner deli more strictly than this technology which could be our extinction event.
They thought they’d suffered enough.
But no…
East Palestine Witnesses Another Train Wreck
“It’s great to be here in North Philistine,” said Biden to a small crowd of gathered fake supporters. “I’m sorry for your loss. I understand how it feels. I lost my son in a train derailment. Not a joke.”
huxley,
“Who changed your life?”
My High School Business Law instructor
George Boole
The Lovely Mrs. Firefly
Andrew Klavan
Rufus:
Wonderful!
I’d love to hear more, though your discretion on The Lovely Mrs. Firefly I would entirely understand.
My high school math teacher gave me the only useful advice I received in those years.
_______________________________
It’s important to find work you enjoy.
_______________________________
He was a hulking linebacker who played college ball for Northwestern, blew out a knee, then taught math and coached football.
I finally took the time to watch the video “Words We’ve Ruined,” and was happy to learn something new: there are words that have been skunked, and there are words that have been bleached. Vivid.
Even though I know it’s wrong, my first assumption is that everything on YouTube has a leftist slant, but this video completely ignored the baleful effects of politics and ideology on language. Why? Unfortunately, now I’m suspicious of the author’s motives. Oh well.
For what it’s worth, my pet peeve is the recent abuse of the word “privilege.”
huxley on February 17, 2024 at 7:57 pm said:
I commented on the AI Vesuvius scrolls a week or so ago. No biggie. I don’t read all comments as conscientiously as I might either.,
__________________________________________________
huxley:
Sorry I missed your comment from last week. If you linked to an article you thought was good, then I’d like to read it. Of course, if you don’t have it at hand, then please don’t bother.
Thanks.
huxley,
My High School Business Law instructor was a practicing lawyer who taught a few hours a week at my High School for fun and side money. I was a bright kid who loved to learn but all the adult men I saw were blue collar, except for a few teachers who, frankly, didn’t seem manly. Although my Business Law teacher was not a hulking linebacker, he was an example that a man could wear a tie to work and still be a man. And he made College sound worthwhile. He wasn’t demanding or strict, but he was not an easy grader. He left it up to us to determine if we were going to work hard enough to do well. He was legitimately angry when I scored a 100 on the final exam. He tried to write his exams so 100s were not possible and I was the first (possibly only) student to do it.
I doubt I would have gone to University had I not met him.
Re: Hitchens / Huxley
Miguel cervantes:
OK. I located your link in the previous topic.
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/books/brave-new-world-foreword/#:~:text=A%20flickering%20hunger%20for%20authenticity%20pushes
I like and sometimes admire Christopher Hitchens, but that was one gasbag of an essay, mostly name and fact dropping. I was interested to discover that Huxley was a teacher at Eton and had Eric Blair (George Orwell) as a student.
The essay was Christopher Hitchens at his worst, just steamrolling the reader with innuendos and nibbles from his Oxford buffet table, rambling in his hyper-intellectual, semi-coherent way fueled by Johnnie Walker Black, while demanding the reader be impressed.
Aldous Huxley was far from perfect, but as far as I’m concerned Hitchens hadn’t a clue.
Hitchens was far too busy posing as a peacock and assassinating Huxley to say much of anything about “Brave New World.”
Cornflour:
Here you go:
https://time.com/6691588/ancient-roman-scroll-decoded-ai/
You are a gracious fellow.
Gay. Livid.
JohnTyler
huxley in reply:
Born and raised in New England, I said “irregardless.” My saying so drove my mother up the wall. She was an Okie who left the state to get a STEM graduate degree. I don’t know where I picked it up. I doubt I did so from visiting Oklahoma.
The only person I recall saying “anyhoo” was my roommate my freshman year in college. He was from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He said it for effect.
My Okie grandmother said “baching it,” for a bachelor living on his own. I ran across the phrase in Willa Cather’s My Antonia.
cornflour
Agreed. I once ran across a discussion at Johnathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy blog about a speech some bigshot had made at the Lakeside School in Seattle. A black student who attended Lakeside made it a point to repeatedly state in the comments, “check your privilege.” Given the elite, privileged nature of the Lakeside School- Bill Gates is a graduate- it is ironic for a student at that school to tell others to “check your privilege.” But the student was only repeating what had been taught.
Looks like “Biden” is inching closer to the war “he” so deeply desires (Part n, and counting)….
‘ “F**k Around & Find Out”: Truckers Warn Loads To NYC Will Be Rejected Starting Monday” ‘—
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fk-around-find-out-truckers-warn-loads-nyc-will-be-rejected-starting-monday
The sequel to the Snowden revelations has arrived.
The censorship military-industrial complex is exposed by former DoS Cybersecurity officer Mike Benz.
Benz states that the most censored and massaged intrusions against democracy occurred with the Covid-19 Pandemic and the 2020 election.
Mike Benz is on Tucker Carlson and it is explosive.
Benz “Reveals How The Military Started Its Censorship Campaign Against US Citizens After Trump Victory.”
“What I’m describing is military rule. It’s the inversion of democracy,” former State Dept. Cybersecurity official Mike Benz tells Tucker Carlson.
YOU KNEW this was coming; now it’s here.
Stunning. Amazing. Replete with universal and totalitarian conversion of internet social media to Deep State purposes.
https://www.infowars.com/posts/state-department-insider-reveals-how-the-military-started-its-censorship-campaign-against-us-citizens-after-trump-victory/
TIME TO BE ARMED AND ANGRY AND DEMAND MASS ARRESTS OF THESE ENEMIES OF AMERICA.
The opening portion Mike Benz lengthy talk with Carlson may be read here, transcribed via RealClearPolitics. In the middle of reading/re-listening finds edits and truncations, however.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/02/16/mike_benz_to_tucker_carlson_from_natos_perspective_the_entire_post-war_world_order_would_collapse_unless_they_censored_the_internet.html
There is a good deal of internet history shared here to foreground the bombshell revelations toward the latter third of the interview.
It is didactic and pedagogic and faintly superior: indeed you might say it was the tone of voice of an Etonian schoolmaster. It is also somewhat contradictory and even self-defeating. Clearly, Huxley disdained socialism and the idea of equality: why then give the name of Bernard Marx to the only dissident in his awful system? And why call one of the few natural and spontaneous girls Lenina? This is stodgy and heavy rather than ironic, and it becomes absurd when we meet an oversexed little child named Polly Trotsky in the opening chapters.
It seems like Hitchens was expecting Huxley to be more straightforwardly and consistently polemical, whereas Huxley wasn’t afraid to be (or couldn’t help being) a little playful and twee. It was after all the age of Winnie the Pooh, Evelyn Waugh, and Ronald Firbank. Many a British writer was tolerant of — even in love with — silliness. Yet it’s Hitchens who accuses Huxley of being too didactic.
I remember Hitchens’s bookchat articles in “The Atlantic,” and alway wondered if they were anything serious or just the usual cliches of British literary opinion repackaged for the Yanks. I’m still not sure, but I suspect it was the latter.
Gosh, someone’s delusional here…but which one(s)?
“Lincoln Project adviser demands Democrats start calling Biden a ‘great president’;
Stuart Stevens claimed Biden was a ‘historically great president’ “—
https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-lincoln-project-adviser-demands-democrats-start-calling-biden-great-president
huxley, 9:21pm 2/17:
I have often suspected very much the same sort of things you say about Christopher Hitchens. Specifically, your paragraph beginning “The essay was…”. Well said.
I say “suspected” but I was fairly convinced by his Atlantic review of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which was chock full of functionally irrelevant anti-Catholic and anti-Thomas-More jibes: basically just high-toned snark.
That was in the latter days of my subscribing to The Atlantic, when it was in the process of tipping far enough to the left (broadly speaking) as not to be worth the bother, never mind the money.
TJ: thanks for highlighting the Mike Benz interview on this thread. You beat me to it. Full version here:
https://tuckercarlson.com/uncensored-the-national-security-state-the-inversion-of-democracy/
Benz is an extremely organized, lucid, and well-informed speaker. And he has the receipts.
https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1759222250241212756
Speaking of delusional…
…this is breathtakingly sick!
“NATO’s New Mission: Peace Through Censorship” [and massive, systematic brainwashing]—
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/natos-new-mission-peace-through-censorship
Orwell has effectively been supplanted…
…as one begins to understand the Putin-“Biden” nexus (axis?) more clearly….
Oh
https://twitter.com/JoeTruzman/status/1759267347414802450
It occurred to me where they got this supersekreet intelligence from goldeneye the first brosnan bond
https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1759275741814870277
RE: Catastrophic population declines in East Asia.
As I’ve written here recently, contrary to the decade’s long worth of warnings by some supposed experts that we are in danger from world-wide over population, we are actually in the midst of the collapse of birth rates and population numbers in a great many countries among the developed nations of the West and, in addition, these population declines are especially catastrophic in East Asia—in China, Japan, and in South Korea.
Peter Zeihan is predicting that China’s population will suffer a tremendous decline by the end of the next decade, with even worse to come, statistics point to Japan being in the midst of a dramatic population decline, and at 0.8 or even less (2.1 is the replacement birthrate at which a country’s population will just remain static) South Korea reportedly has the lowest birth rate in the world.
These gigantic demographic declines have a myriad of consequences, none of them good.
Not only is there a web of many social and political consequences, but these consequences are also economic as well, as steadily shrinking younger, working, tax-paying population cohorts are called upon to support cohorts comprised of an ever increasing number of the non-working elderly, who require increasingly greater amounts of expensive health care.
Moreover, the catastrophic population declines in these three East Asian countries are also apparently irreversible, with Japan, for instance, having spent a reported $300 billion dollars over the last several years in efforts to increase the Japanese birth rate, but with no success.
What risky courses of action might a country–facing a guaranteed near future and radical decline in it’s population and, thus, in it’s economy, it’s capabilities, and it’s influence in the World–contemplate and do while it still could?
Looking over the situation in these three East Asian countries, it appears that in addition to various economic developments, one of the main factors in driving such catastrophic population declines are the particular, rigid social and cultural structures of each one of these countries.
Thus, for instance, Japan is–for all intents and purposes—racially 100% Japanese, but is not going to allow the entry of great numbers of non-Japanese “foreigners” to immigrate to Japan as a way to alleviate their population decline.*
See, for instance, https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d00893/
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgGvUNiykyU
Thank you Hubert.
Snow on The Pine-yes. I periodically follow Zeihan, and on China in particular.
He does get thing wrong— for instance, with Putin’s war in Ukraine, he expected Russian pipelines to collapse from winter freezing waters pressuring and busting the pipes. And either it didn’t happen or it happened too little to stanch their creative Mass oil export business.
Therefore, Zeihan’s medium and long term judgements — unlike his near-term estimates — are more reliable, I think
Snow writes “Peter Zeihan is predicting that China’s population will suffer a tremendous decline by the end of the next decade, with even worse to come.”
Chinese demo pressures are worsened by post pandemic economic collapse, while Xi has become the reigning worst totalitarian ruler, who’s too insulated as a ruler to get course correction from any contrary opinion. Thus China is now inflexible, running on a bad autopilot.
.
Xi’s control freak rulership might end up breaking China back into its traditional regions. At present, it is dominated by the Han from North Central China. But economic weakness or decline from mal-investment could see the re-emergence of coastal trading China versus the interior, perhaps along ethnic lines.
No one talks about it. But during the Trump years, China loomed large as threatening rival and dangerous competitor, aiming at world dominance through productivity and the Belt and Road indentured servitude development program. Now, Italy has rejected B&R, and China is too fiscally distressed to keep its powerful global ambitions alive.
That leaves Taiwan — Will Xi roll the dice? And gamble on a blockade to starve her out? It may work as a domestic national destiny move, over the next years of this decade.
It was a huge readjustment we’ve seen play out here, to see the Chinese as an increasingly dangerous threat to US security. Now, with population decline already well underway and one-third of the economy mired in unsustainable debt and Chinese employment failing to deliver, generating a dangerous army of young and unemployed men, the segment that’s most dangerous to political stability — the sudden change in her perceived fortunes means the US is gaining breathing room.
New calculations about the her future role and ability to achieve Xi’s grandiose ambitions put almost everything into reverse,
And given our unsustainable debt, with One-Trillion dollar debt service expected to be larger than Defense spending this year — strategically, we need this break.
And this is the knock-on change no one talks about — yet. Perhaps later in the Presidential campaign this year?
I agree with Zeihan that Southeast Asia’s one billion person market will be the best frontier economic story for the next decade. It’s also where the young can best pursue their ambitions for fortune.
Liz Cheney: “I think that we have to take Donald Trump very seriously … You’ve now got a Putin wing of the Republican Party.”
Stop it, Liz – you’re making me blush.
RE; East Asian population decline–
Oops, I believe that the number for Japanese government spending trying to reverse their decline was actually $300 million, not billion.
Still, a whole hell of a lot of money, and their failure an indicator of just how intractable this problem is.
At first glance, you’d think that if you set up a program, offered a substantial payment for each child born and, thereafter, all sorts of financial and other support as a child moves through his schooling and grows to adulthood, that people would jump at the chance to have children, and plenty of them, but, apparently–given all of the forces operative in the Japanese socio-cultural and economic environment–in the entire situation–government programs and propaganda are just not able to motivate people.
People’s hearts are just not in it anymore, and there is apparently a massive loss of what might be termed “civilizational confidence,” and, as side effects, all sorts of what I see as bizarre cultural trends–dwindling marriage, sexual activity, and child bearing, yet, “love hotels” everywhere, the great popularity of hyper violent anime, young people who stay in their rooms and never leave them, fascination with cutesy, infantile cartoon characters, etc.
So that George Floyd will not have died in vain….
“Black Activist Lawyer’s Idea To Stop Law-Breaking: Just Legalize Crime”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/black-activist-lawyers-idea-stop-law-breaking-just-legalize-crime
All in the definitions, I guess…
(Cf. “Biden” administration, NYC and DC judges, etc…..)
Public Service Announcement: Some “Stuff” I’ll censor for ye’ so YOU don’t have to do it yerselves…
(Not much, all thing considered…just a few things that you’re really NOT supposed to know about…pay attention to…or if you do somehow find out, take to heart…)
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/harvard-professor-says-all-hell-broke-loose-when-his-study-revealed-no-racial-bias-police
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2024/02/18/poorer-angrier-divided-south-africa-after-30-years-of-the-anc/
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/mexico-or-belgium-calls-to-mobilise-army-as-gang-war-sweeps-brussels/
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/watch-mobs-violent-african-migrants-riot-attack-police-holland
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/munich-report-mass-migration-more-worrying-than-russia/
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/german-media-giants-launch-massive-campaign-against-far-right/
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/power-struggles-lawsuits-and-wars-plague-eu-censorship-roll-out/
Oh, and this is just the tip of the iceberg…. (OTOH, icebergs are generally WHITE, i.e., if they’re not bluish or dark grayish and so can be ignored, reviled, canceled, etc….)
RE: East Asian population declines
Can anything be done?
Could a radical disruption of the web of current constraining socioeconomic and political systems in these countries enable these countries to again grow in population?
And, if so, just how radical would such disruption have to be to be effective?