…if it weren’t the case that concerning ourselves with language — specifically, how it has been institutionally gamed to push the political needle leftward through linguistically incoherent foundational assumptions, rhetorical tyrannies, and hermeneutic Machiavellianism — wasn’t so pedantic, pseudo-intellectual, and “fundamentally unserious” an undertaking.
Let the left play around with that inconsequential stuff. We on the right can fund raise for the next GOPer in line like mutherfuckers!
So. Carry on. And of course, go team!
(thanks to geoffb)
John Stormer could not be reached for comment on the odds of a None Dare Call it Bullshit.
When the rest of the mainstream catches up with these arguments, you can bet your ass that I’ll work tirelessly to make sure the body of thought becomes known as the Armadillo School.
THEN:
“Hah ha ha! Daddy! The King is naked! ” -> dead child with crossbow bolts lodged in torso. Hanged father. Family leaving the capitol city and lying about heir surname.
NOW:
“Hah ha ha! Step-Daddy! The intelligentsia is naked! ” -> child is given ritalin, moved to a class for dangerous kids, forced to take abusive sensitivity classes accusing him/her personally of embodying a history of rape slavery and murder, put on a “do not hire” list, told he/she is an inauthentic example of his or her ethnic background, told that God is a delusion, family is strongly encouraged to isolate, demonize, and criminalize child until compliance is achieved and will be publicly called bad parents if they don’t.
You’ve come a long way baby! Except not in the middle east so much.
– You left out forced fem cicumcision, which, along with the Vagina chronicles, is natures way of saying “why the fuck can’t I get a date?”
I don’t think they really disapprove of forced female circumcision. They seem rather predisposed to defend the people who practice it from all the neo-colonialist cultural imperialism.
They don’t seem to worry about pederasty much either. Or human trafficking. Or slavery where it exists in the world today.
The only thing that really seems to bother them is the wrong people(the lower middle class) working hard, benefitting from it, owning things, and being able to go and buy what they want.
Obama Seeks 2013 Tax Cuts Within Limits
or
Obama Seeks 2013 Tax Hikes Above $250K
For the NY Times, Lakoff is late by about 80 years.
NPR contributes: GOP To Make 31st Attempt To Repeal Obamacare Act.
Old and obvious observations but what the heck:
I thought it was bad, way back in my college days (late 70s – early 80s). Made the mistake of pointing out the biological differences between men and womyn to my sociology prof–my precise words were “For starters, I can’t have a baby.” She helpfully put the words into my mouth that therefore, I believed that the wimmen folk were inferior.
Tried to never speak up in that class again.
O/t – any PWers in the Michigan area? I’m having a bit of a blogger gathering. H2 people. But if anyone’s around … email me.
Oh, and it’s NEXT weekend. Not this. Next.
Oh, and Lackoff is supposed to be teh Smartz and all, but he comes off as a pretty pathetic little booger-eater in the exerpts that Zombie posted.
I mean, he does a helluva job fighting straw men and all. But his caricatures of “the idealized conservative family” is just about as realistic as these portraits.
But not quite.
– Being the quinticential smartass as always, I would have chuckled and asked her what part of “can’t have” didn’t she understand.
– But thats just how I roll. (Yes college for mwah was ‘interesting’.)
“But not quite.”
– Any and all references to a strong self reliant family unit drowns the nannystatw narritive into oblivion. Its like garlic to a vampire.
Which is fascinating since so many disciplines, including literature, art, philosophy,
architecture,fiction, and literary criticism in no way use any scientific or objective efforts to explain reality. I assume architecture uses some science presumably based on an objective understanding of natural laws when determining stress, loads, tension, torque, et al, but a discussion of engineering qua science is a whole ‘nother thing. But I’m certain I have never thought of architecture as explaining reality in any meaningful sense.What a load of codswallop.
Ah, you guys had it easy. Try being a conservative chicka who doesn’t truck with the Newspeak and majoring in Psychology.
All politics is moral, and morality trumps policy.”
Progressivism is a religion. Don’t ever forget it.
“Progressivism is a religion. Don’t ever forget it.”
Of the Ghost Dancing stripe..
Indeed.
A past associate initially delved deep into much of merit but then, owing to a lack of simple soulful integrity brought about by unfortunate nature and nurture, had literally no underlying integrity. She was, by all of the circumstantial evidence, a postmodernist. An emotionalist. An existential, unmoored ozone-farter, albeit a fun and interesting (and opportunistic) one and one with potential for one day becoming actual human. I hope.
But whereas she, either on a good day or when coralled, could point to objective “reality” and even riff well on elements of it, she was wholly undeterred by, say, mine, especially when she shat upon it which she did with increasing…regularity. She was undeterred by anything external and verifiable, as undeterred as she was by anything objectively observed about her inability to relate as a normal human.
What I’m getting at is that the paradox of postmodernism, in this case, lied in her divining a richly fantastic new reality of one. So the other side of the no-reality coin is that you get to invent your own.
Hence the utility to contemporary codswhallop, and thus the utility to lying through your teeth — whether individually or as a member of your progressive troup — because you are your own God.
She claimed to have “known the mind of God” too. And to be able to levitate.
Reality? This!
So the other side of the no-reality coin is that you get to invent your own.
Which is way more fun than having to adapt to actual reality. Our very success as a society provides the means to insulate ourselves from Newtonian Mechanics, which produces these fantasy-children, which inevitably leads to our downfall.
Entropy, in other words.
The silliest thing about leftist messaging was contained in Zombie’s graphic.
Oh, I came up with plenty of smartass comebacks later on, bbh. But this was the first time I witnessed a prof’s sheer, bloodyminded pinkoness, and I was too gobsmacked to respond. (I was just a poor naif from a microscopically small town where regular church attendance, hunting, the American Legion, and 4H were regarded as good things.)
Bingo. A religion of narcissism. Which is why Bumblefuck is such a perfect saviour.
At 13 in a boarding school 1000 miles from home, I attempted to tell my English teacher I thought the “he/she” convention was stupid. Pick a pronoun and stick with it.
I was told to “go home and beat your wife.” Needless to say that was the last time I spoke in that class unless a question was directed to me…
[…] Jeff on language and hermeneutics, suddenly in vogue with conservatives. […]
I attempted to tell my English teacher I thought the “he/she” convention was stupid. Pick a pronoun and stick with it.
Go plural.
Or, if you’re a tech writer, blame it all on the machine so that you can use “it.”
““Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific or objective efforts to explain reality.”
– And therein lies the source of their flawed thinking, and leads to jackass conclusions.
– Non-scientists always confuse the basic ‘scientific process” with evryday things they are familure with, and so totally mischaracterize how scientists think, what they actually aver to ‘know’, and also confuse “objective” with pedantic.
– An honest scientist, in the right setting, will admit that we don’t ‘know’ anything, all is models that happen to seem to mimic reality to a greater or lessor degree. We move the ball along as we improve those models, which is what scientists really do. Question. We question everything. Nothing is settled. ever. Even those things that the scientific community temporarily will assert as settled aren’t really settled.
– But you can’t elicit grants and aprobation by saying things like that to an audiance incapable of seeing the nuance of your work. So settled it is to the great emotion based mob, and off they go on their wild flights of mental fancy.
– Of course some of them know what they’re doing is bullshit, but you can’t base a religion on reality and truth if you want it to survive.
People should have this drilled into them from the time they’re old enough to know what the individual words mean: “All that you ever hear or read, should be taken as intended to serve the motives of the author and no one else.”
The postmodernist bridge often falls down because the post modernist, in the quest for objectivity, typically fails to perceive reality through the Western Imperialist gravitational-ist, molecular structural-ist, frictional-ist, and stress-analysis-ist lenses. But it doesn’t matter because physics, like biology, is a mere cultural construct that will pass away in the face of progress for it is on the wrong side of history.
OK, so Zombie’s brilliant article does address the use and abuse of language, but does it delve into intentionalism? I say no, because the use of euphemism to affect perception is properly understood as “Orwellian,” as in “Ministry of Love,” to denote the torture chambers.
Lakoff is not explaining how to seize someone else’s signifiers and replace the speaker’s meaning with his own: he’s explaining how to use framing and euphemism as the lipstick on a pig.
Except, as Zombie notes, Lakoff thinks that the lipstick is the pig, and therefore is as vividly red as whatever brand he bought.
That’s a whole new type of linguistic incoherence, different in essence from intentionalism but by no means mutually exclusive from it.
Zombie’s essay was wonderful, but Jeff still stands alone on the intentionalism hill.
But it doesn’t matter because physics, like biology, is a mere cultural construct that will pass away in the face of progress for it is on the wrong side of history.
“Facts” and “objective reality” are White Xtian Hetero Male constructs designed to oppress Teh Other and therefore can be safely ignored or blasted away. Real Feminists reject “science” altogether as the Patriarchal Tool Of Oppression that it is.
“I was told to “go home and beat your wife.”
Instead, I went to Howard Johnson’s via a Greyhound buss and fucked his wife. As I tenderly ate mouth fulls of room service fruit salad off her ass, as she giggled, I realized that I was a bad person and that the he/she convention proved this. So I that’s why I’m writing to you Penthouse Letters…
“Real Feminists reject “science” altogether as the Patriarchal Tool Of Oppression that it is.”
Hopefully real feminists rent their office in three story and under buildings then. ;)
“But it doesn’t matter because physics, like biology, is a mere cultural construct that will pass away in the face of progress for it is on the wrong side of history.”
– History is a record of the mistakes we’ve made. Progress is when we stop lying to ourselves.
“Thermal expansion and metal fatigue are just white devil poison meant to imprison your mind!”
Balconey falls off building and crushes a bunch of empty newspaper machines outside.
” Sabotage! Probably Jews! Or global warming! Demons! “
You already fell into his trap. Government is an institution formed by adults, to serve adults. Lakoff “frames” the argument with a false choice: Mommy or Daddy. The government isn’t a parent, and accepting it either as mother or as father put citizens in the role of a child to be cared for.. which is just the false premise he wants you to accept.
link
Nope.
Hhistory is an inevitable mythical force that produces greater and greater examples of humanity in a strange pseudo-Darwinian sequence and it overcomes obstacle after obstacle in a binary dialectic confrontation always that ends with the triumph of a newer and better paradigm until at last utopia arrives. Progress is anything that lessens the difficulty of the inevitable movement towards Utopia.
Progress is the lubricant that facilitates the inevitable force of history. History is the self actualized cause of utopia in motion. It overcomes and eventually completely destroys all oppositional forces as atavistic debris. History is a net force that always has a direction leading towards Utopia. It is always greater than retarding forces like physics, logic, biology, psychology or anything else. Is is the universe shaping itself to an ideal and ignoring the protests of crude matter.
Yeah, well, that’s what you say…
History and progress as defined by the left are a denial of reality and the material world masquerading as a clearer and superior understanding of the material world.
Leftism is a Ghost Dance. They’ll all dance and the stuff they hate will be gone and the world will be as they envision it. And if they fuck up and end up with the usual piles of rotting, bullet hole riddled, soot stained skulls in a barren ash covered waste, then they will claim leftism was never properly tried and blame their opponents for the “failure” even if those opponents are long dead.
The motive served by my saying it is that people stop filling their heads with bullshit and calling it brilliance.
Except that when they call it brilliance they’re serving their own motives.
Which motivates me to swing crowbars at eye level in their immediate vicinity.
Which motivates them to tell me, “Hey, stop that!”
Which motivates me to say, “Just as soon as you stop filling your head with bullshit and calling it brilliance.”
It’s all in how you manage the motive.
My motive is always to end world hunger and cure world peace.
For the children.
“It’s all in how you manage the motive.”
– If Progressivism is the Lubricant of the Utopia, they better have a trainload of it on hand, because their ideology will lead them enexorably to the mother of all self-ass-fucking’s.
– Every time they ‘win’ and take down another stable society, they’re the first to be lined up against the wall and shot. They always scream and cry out the same thing. The society they destroyed wasn’t civilized enough to see the brilliance of their visions.
– And then they’re dead.
Who is the next in line, any way? Newt will be way too old… Santorum?
Or will that break the cycle?
– Someone like Christie, or maybe the snowbilly will rise from the ashes, but they’re both way to far outside the ruling class mindset to make the grade probably.
I think my crowbar strategy helps to focus their minds on more immediate things.
– Crowbars certainly win out in the end McGehee, but its slow going. (See The Big Noise – San Diego, 1912)
– As always the faster route is “The only good anarchist is a dead anarchist”.
“- And then they’re dead.”
If one observes what has happened and extrapolates what might happen, one might almost think that history is naturally progressing towards viking raiders and chaos and that unjust societies have been laboring mightily to avoid this. It’s probably just an artifact of false consciousness though. Rejoice comrade! For the revolution is not restricted by what is seen by confused slaves to the corrupt bosses! Also rejoicing is mandatory. Failure to rejoice is the mark of wreckers and saboteurs. If the people’s morale subsides it must be renewed by the swift action of the party. The deaths of traitors never fail to stir the crowds and the party knows its duty to the people well! Bread and justice! So rejoice! Forward! Forward over many graves if need be! Forward! Utopia awaits.
Or vikings.
Sure, but it’s just giving them what they want, sending them where they can finally be truly free of rules.
“Headed in the right direction”
– He dropped that line in his stump speech at the very next stop, after a phalanx of GOP’etrs went on Camera, repeated his words and said Seriously?.
And I got two pictures of Romney plus a separate personalized letter in the past two mail days.
Postal service is one of the enumerated powers, right?
– Yeh. Its called “Franking”, where you bed/marry your male secretary and build your rep on a trillion dollar hosuing bubble scam. Its all the rage with Denocrats these days.
– The Left (HuffPo) is watching Roves every move these days. They’re just absolutely sure hes up to something, so they’ve broken out the tin-foil.
– The Dark Knight just scares the crap out of them.
Heh. But Frank represents the nadir of the Republic. In many aspects.
Hey, remember when the U.N. Human Rights Council elected Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya as chair? Well, Gaddafi is dead now, sooo…
The fun never stops, does it?
U.S. out of UN, UN out of U.S.
Somewhat in this vein, this piece at scribd (13 pages) might find interest and if so there is also a 300 page full edition there also.
U.S. out of UN, UN out of U.S.
I’ve been advocating this for decades.
There were — and are still, in some circumstances — very good reasons tv stations and state run media houses were among the first physical plants overrun during both failed and successful revolts against tyrannical or communist rule. Nowadays people will likely mostly just maneuver around them when the shit hits the fan, as we can see in Syria and Iran, for a couple of instances among many. Control is going to prove to be very expensive for our betters here in the US. I wonder whether they’ll even be able to afford it?
. By the end of the 1980s, economic chaos in the Soviet Union forced the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, to institute reforms: glasnost was declared. Also during this period, Lithuania established many democratic changes, and the press became more and more independent. In 1988 the Lithuanian Communist Party (LCP) was forced to relinquish its monopoly on the press and by 1989 censorship ceased. This angered Gorbachev who then tried to curb the media. In January 1991, Soviet forces occupied the LCP in Vilnius and took control of the newspaper presses. The troops also occupied the Committee of Radio and Television and the TV tower. This move revealed the magnitude of Gorbachev’s fear of the influence of the press and the extent to which he would go to curb its power. However, although he had considerable success against the broadcast media, he could not control the print press. The final collapse of the Soviet Union gave Lithuania the freedom to govern itself for the first time since 1940. On March 11, 1990, it became the first of the Soviet republics to declare its independence. This proclamation was officially recognized in September of 1991.
http://www.pressreference.com/Ky-Ma/Lithuania.html
Speaking of history, what has changed in the last 8 thousand years other than technology?
“….what has changed in the last 8 thousand years….”
– Hometown just added steak to its dinner meal all 7 days of the week.
When H. sapiens sapiens became the sole human species, its evolution ceased to be biological and became cultural. The most successful culture, whatever it might be, will end up subsuming all the others.
Then it’ll come down to Coke vs. Pepsi. And I don’t mean competing for market share — shit’s gonna get real.
Sounds like the burger wars in Judge Dredd.
“Evolution grinds slowly”
– Police in Omaha were called out recently to a bank robbery at a downtown Citi bank branch, when the would be robber tried to affect the holdup using a Bic ballpoint pen as his weapon of choice. The teller told police she almost choked on the gum drops she had been eating when the robber appeoached her window, and after a few minutes of her simply laughing and refusing to give over the money, the thief left in a huff, leaving a damand note behind that had his name and address on it.
– Police later apprehended the perp at his home. When questioned about the note he explained he’d written out a practice note, and a final version, and must have gotten them confused and taken the wrong one to the robbery.
– And the ballpoint? He said he needed the money, but he’d never think of threatening anyone with a dangerous weapon.
BBH,
Interestingly, that little news tidbit seems a fine metaphor for George Lakoff’s (Rhymes With) Little Blue Book.