Archives for category: Semiotics
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Sticky

January 17, 2023 //
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“Died suddenly” would not possess memetic traction were excess deaths not running way above ten percent, and those deaths not attributable to COVID.

It’s the context of high profile on-air collapses and demises within the post-pandemic statistical reality that provides teeth to the speculation about the Pfizer and Moderna products’ adverse effects.

If there were stats but no anecdotes, or anecdotes but no stats, then there’d be reason for corrosive skepticism about either. But we find them together, and must deal with them as bolstering each other; skepticism means you should apply some of your cultivated dubiety against the medical protocols rushed through by Trump and foisted upon the world.

twv

Categories A Journal of a Plague Year, memetics

Freedom of Speech & Press

November 23, 2022 //
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Free speech wouldn’t confuse people so much if they thought a bit more about this term of art in the context of “freedom of the press. ”

Like freedom of speech, everyone — not just “journalists” — has free press rights. But that doesn’t mean that you get to go into the pressroom of your local newspaper and print out your favorite recipes, rants or porn. Your free press rights relate to your owned technology that can be used for transmitting ideas.

If you have a camera, printer, xerox, mimeograph, web press, Internet server, whatever, your free press rights pertain to what you own and may legally control. If the bank comes in and confiscates your press because you have defaulted on the loan, it’s not abridging your free press rights. Though such an act would hinder your press workings, by freedom of contract the bank is OK to do affect your ability “to speak” via the press. 

Arguably, though, if the local mafia barges in and steals it, it does abridge those rights — the mafiosi’s theft is more than mere theft if done to squelch your printing about the mafia’s workings. And, by convention, this applies even more to governments, the traditional enemy of freedom of the press.

Freedom of the press is merely freedom of speech translated into the realm of transmitting speech beyond the reach of your vocalizations.

And, like freedom of speech, freedom of the press is not a fundamental right, no matter how primary a concern it be.

Both are terms of art, and one must have some knowledge of the social world to make sense of them. Not all speech is free speech, and not all press activities are free press actions — but the people who make this point most vociferously usually do so to suppress free speech and press. Which is why the issue is difficult.

twv

Summary Postscript: Both rights depend on property and custom. They are both instances of the basic human right to liberty, which includes the right to acquire, maintain, and divest property on whatever terms you may negotiate.

The Twitter-Pepe image, above, is by
Who Knows found on the You Know What.

Categories Basic Principles, Constitutional Concerns, Law, Lexicography

The Affliction That Is Inflicted

November 16, 2022 //
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We have inflation because we let inflationists have power:

The Century Company (1927; 1942).
Categories Lexicography, money

Hey, Hey, Hey!

June 30, 2022 //
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How many substantiated facts would one have to discount to believe that Bill Cosby did not drug and rape his accusers?

I know he was convicted and went to prison. So some facts likely exist. But all I heard was testimony. And the testimony of accusers and witnesses is often profoundly unreliable. Further, I suppose it is possible for an urban legend to evolve to such an extent as to encourage many false accusations that would then gain the weight of evidence.

The same people who would say that this sort of phenomenon would be impossible or highly unlikely nevertheless believe just such processes account for the origins of most major religions.

This is one of my favorite points to contemplate about the Pure Theory of Conspiracy and, even more pertinently, Invisible Hand Theory. 

It’s one reason why my estimate of general opinion has declined, as has “the consensus” in authority, and now I take everything with a grain of salt. Much of what occupies our minds may be, to some degree, fake. Error. Folly. Lies. Or a combination of all of these.

twv

Categories Law, memetics

It’s “The” Ukraine After All

February 27, 2022 //
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For a few years now we’ve been scolded into not putting the definite article in front of “Ukraine,” like we did for decades and decades.

Now, the reason for this recent switch from The Ukraine to just Ukraine had never reached my ears, so I looked it up today.

The rationale? It is about political independence, or so the story goes:

In 2015, following President Obama’s use of “the Ukraine” at a press conference, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine explained that “the Ukraine” was what the Soviet Union called the region during Soviet rule. As an independent country, it is simply called “Ukraine.”
“It is incorrect to refer to the Ukraine, even though a lot of people do it,” explained former ambassador William Taylor in a Time article published in March 2015. Using the article alongside the name of the country, he said, can be seen as denying Ukraine’s independence.

Sam Kirk, “Why Ukraine isn’t called ‘the Ukraine’” (February 24, 2022 / 03:43 PM MST; Updated: Feb 24, 2022 / 03:43 PM MST).

But this smacks of . . . bad history. I mean, do you really believe it? I smelled a rat. So I looked it up on Google Books.

Behold The Ukraine and the Ukrainians, by Stepan Rudnyt︠s︡ʹkyĭ — in 1915. Yes, before THE SOVIET UNION. And yes, we find “The Ukraine” right alongside “Ukraine”:

“The Ukraine” precedes The Soviets. Maybe it was an element of the Czar’s hegemonic vocabulary, I wouldn’t be shocked, but if today’s Ukrainian political correctness is shown to have weak foundational rationales, maybe they can just lighten up a bit.*

I’ll stick to just Ukraine the moment folks around the world stop referring to “the United States” in the singular. Technically, after all, the union is but the United States are.

But insisting on this nomenclature at this late date would, I am sure, be regarded by most people as needlessly pedantic. As are most politically correct appellations.

It reminds me of when, in Eighth Grade, my class’s astute teacher listed all the words for people our age: youths, children, juveniles, adolescents, kids, etc. We found each one of them iffy, tainted with the whiff of the pejorative. At that moment I realized that maybe we should all lighten up a bit. Juveniles!

twv

* Right now they will be defending themselves, as is natural. With guns and bombs. Not politic niceties.

N.B. We might want to note that we have been scolded by a former ambassador. It is the kind of thing maybe we should learn to ignore: politically correct claptrap from known failures. Such folk have nothing to show for themselves other than being namby-pamby scolds. Note also that this particular ambassador also wants to spell “Kiev” Kyiv. OK. I used to be a stickler for endonyms over exonyms, too. But I came to realize that sticking to endonyms is by no means easy to universalize, and it may serve mostly as pharisaic positioning, not anything substantive.

Categories Ideological currents, semantics

A Farrago for Our Time

February 22, 2022 //
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I wonder how many times I have looked up the word “farrago.” Just to “make sure,” you know. I guess I feel it should mean something more specific than my dictionary’s definition of “confused mixture.”

Much the same can be said about the word “neoliberal.” From writer to writer, news reader to teacher to journo to pol, the word apparently means many different things: I’ve been both accused of — and praised for — “being” a neoliberal. But so have anarchists I’ve known. So has Hillary Clinton.

What’s going on here?

In the March issue of Reason, Jesse Walker explains the predicament and its history. “It’s the End of the Neoliberal Era, and We Still Don’t Know What Neoliberalism Is,” captures the problem nicely.

The ultra-condensed take-away from this essay is: the word started out as an attempt between the first and second world wars to rescue some of the flavor of liberalism without all that rigorous laissez faire stuff. In other words, the term meant a market-friendly statist who opposed dictatorship and too much government. Pretty much what “liberal” meant in America, until all the Big Spenders and Over-Regulators turned it into a pinkish-hued cover for ”social democracy.” Now we just call them progressives.

But by the time Ronald Reagan got into office razzing “the liberals,” neoliberalism meant something else. And . . . leftists, aghast that Chile’s dictator General Pinochet had consulted with some free market economists (taking only some of their advice), began calling libertarians neoliberals, and . . . talk about farrago!

But it’s a farrago for our time. The upshot of Jesse Walker’s essay is that neoliberal may not mean anything specific, but it is a good specifier of the age now ending, the result of many competing paradigms and the compromises of diverse, on-the-make interest groups.

What a confused mixture.

twv

Categories Ideological currents, semantics

Quasi-conspiracy

February 9, 2022 //
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A conspiracy is a group of people working in secret to commit a crime.

But is an attempt to change the rules to redefine what a crime is itself a crime? And would a secret attempt, then, be a conspiracy?

Hold on . . .

Right now, the biggest political movement underway is “Build Back Better” or “The Great Reset.” It is an attempt to revise society from the top down in nearly every domain of life. It has been closely associated with the “climate justice” movement because climate alarmists think everything must be changed to “save the planet,” though their data and reasoning do not strike me as very good at all. Those who hold these beliefs are much exasperated by the sheer fact that most Americans do not regard climate as the even in the Top Ten of reasonable political priorities. But there is hope for the radicals on this issue, for whom democracy is getting in the way of political action: in the last two years a much better way of instituting radical reforms (political revolution from the top) has been found: the pandemic. Making us all wear masks, deciding who can work and where, forcing people to take experimental therapeutics and calling them “vaccines” — these are all beyond merely radical. They are quite tyrannical controls, and are part of The Great Reset.

I consider it all quite criminal — and in America, the pressure government and politicians have placed upon social media platforms constitutes a clear violation of the First Amendment, and is thus unconstitutional and (in the old, broad sense) un-American.

But is it a conspiracy?

Well, it’s been out in the open. So: no.

But then notice something: the people who have brought up the alarm about this “open” policy advocacy and planning have repeatedly been called “conspiracy theorists.” And, therefore, are regarded commonly as fringe, as nutty. Examples include Glenn Beck (with a new book out on the subject, I hear) and the indefatigable Alex Jones.

This calumny marginalizes opposition to the policy (The Great Reset), insulating it from criticism — or even open discussion. It means that people generally can ignore the process of fascification.*

So, I’d call the Davos-devised, globalist Great Reset a “quasi-conspiracy.” Its openness is obscured by psy-op. Thus the elites and academics who have been pushing it are, indeed, quasi-conspirators.

twv

Novel Terms:

To fascify is to unite people politically in an alarmingly totalitarian manner, “to make fascistic.”

A quasi-conspiracy is a public effort to change the scope and definition of crime or government that is protected from public criticism by accusing the effort’s critics of being “conspiracy theorists” — gaining the secretive element of a conspiracy by the psychological operation of accusation of “conspiracy theory.”

While these are my coinages, quick searches of the Internet show previous uses. Uses of the former term are close to my definition, above, while previous uses of the latter are less interesting than mine, for my specific use has, shall we say, a special character.

Categories Conspiracy, Lexicography

The Apt Black Opposite of the Kyle Rittenhouse Case

November 22, 2021 //
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A lot of people have constructed propagandistic memes to the effect that ”things would be different” had Kyle been black. Every one of these memes have failed because the memetic engineer could not engineer the precisely opposite situation to Kyle Rittenhouse’s. So let me try. I mean, it’s a worthy counterfactual, right?

What if Kyle were black?

What if the 17-year-old African-American male traveled across a state line to his father’s community after a White Lives Matter protest turned violent and burned down a huge hunk of his father’s town. The protest was over the police shooting a white guy during a domestic squabble.

Now, the trick in this example is not to make everything opposite — this white man would have to become a white woman, right, to be “completely” opposite? If “make everything opposite” were the rule in constructing such examples, we would merely engage in Bizarro World japery. (So this haploid is carrying a ray gun…) So, let’s keep it close. And let’s make initial spark for the ”protests” this: a white criminal man got shot by police while reaching for his knife after walking away from the police who had told him to stand down. Same as the Kenosha criminal. And this man survives, though most protesters think he’s dead. It’s only the races we need to flip.

So a White Live Matter group protested the shooting, and the protest turns quickly to riot, which spreads. And the cops stand down, letting it all burn: the cops are on the side of the whites, this time, after all!

Amidst this, a number of heroic black people take to the streets to help victims, put out fires, and wash away graffiti. Our black Kyle is carrying a scary-to-liberals rifle and as the evening wears on gets chased by other black people who beat him with a skate board and try to take away his weapon. Some shots are fired, and our black Kyle kills two men, black, and wounds another, also black.

For his trouble, the Republican presidential candidate calls this Kyle a black supremacist and the major media constantly calls Kyle a murderer, moments after, and all the way into his trial.

What are the most unbelievable things about this scenario, as written? To make it the most apt opposite-race example, what should I change?

twv

Categories Criminology, memetics, terrorism

Effigies Out for Harambe

October 20, 2021 //
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In New York City, which has seen better days, statues are once again in the news.

Not statutes, but statuary.

“The New York City Public Design Commission voted unanimously Monday to move a controversial 188-year-old statue of Thomas Jefferson from the City Council chambers a City Hall,” informs the city’s ABC affiliate.

You have guessed the reason: racism, slavery and … pedophilia? What?

“Assemblyman Charles Barron, the former councilman who tried to get the statue removed in 2001,” doesn’t want it just removed and given to the New-York Historical Society, as planned, explains the New York Times. “I don’t think it should go anywhere. I don’t think it should exist,” proclaimed Mr. Barron — who also accused Jefferson of pedophilia.

Meanwhile, over at Bowling Green Park, a seven-foot-tall statue of the late gorilla Harambe was installed “directly across from the famous Charging Bull statue, which was surrounded by 10,000 bananas (that will later be donated to local food banks and community fridges) to make a point about wealth disparity,” according to reporting by the Big Apple’s NBC affiliate.

Whereas I can sorta see a case for removing Thomas Jefferson’s statue — if I am being ultra-charitable — this stunt is not merely silly, its symbolism is ultra-opaque. Bananas under a bull statue being stared down by the effigy of a gorilla executed years ago in Chicago? What? 

The idea by the perpetrators is that the Wall Street Bull has more bananas than the gorilla does. Apparently, poor people are gorillas. It is rather amusing how old racist “tropes” keep coming back.

Bananas!

Is someone supposed to be moved by this? I mean, more than to snicker?

There is a theory that this sort of symbology obsessions is being encouraged by elitists behind the scenes — the folks with so many bananas! — to get us mere peons fighting amongst ourselves, the better to distract us from the horrors of said elitists.

The statuary-obsessed should look into this theory. They might have occasion to feel used.

For we have bigger problems to handle than the symbolism of public art.

And the third president as pedophile? What?!?

twv

Categories Propaganda, symbology

Vaxation

October 10, 2021 //
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Universal and mandatory “vaccination” with an experimental set of gene-therapy-based concoctions that sport very limited utility in the cause of developing immunity strikes me as crazy. I mean, not even worth considering beyond the first brush with the notion. Yet most of the cultural elite and masses of their dutiful sheep have fallen for it, and now push it with alarming force.

And some of my favorite libertarian writers and leaders are so “pro-vaxx” that they spend most of their time ridiculing those of us who are beyond skeptical of the whole government-business alliance. This makes them, I hazard, instruments of totalitarianism. They have assumed the position of useful (pseudo-)opposition and thereby help the cause of statism, as academic libertarians tend to, and have done so for decades.

Be that as it may, the terminological question remains: what do we call this push? The struggle to find the right words continues. But Dr. Bryam W. Bridle, of the University of Guelph, has offered one useful term: herd vaccination. That is the goal. “Herd immunity” is not the goal, for it cannot be achieved by the method chosen. Yet it is strenuously and tyrannically pushed.

They push herd vaccination. A great term. And they push herd vaccination for reasons other than what they state.

This includes the “pro-vaxx libertarians.” But I will leave the dissection of their motives for another occasion.

But, for the record, I have a term to offer, too:

From memevigilante.com.

But “daft” is a gross understatement.

twv

Categories A Journal of a Plague Year, immunology, Lexicography
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