Archives for category: Linguistics
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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

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

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

The Isms: Social, Communal, Collective

August 21, 2021 //
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Photo: Ralf, Flickr, some rights reserved

Is Socialism the cousin of Communism?

. . . as answered on Quora. . . .

Economist Yves Guyot was puzzled by this, too. So he consulted the literature and the politicians who promoted one or the other or both. Here is what he wrote in Socialistic Fallacies (1910), about Marx and Engels’ infamous word choice:

They chose “communism” because the word “socialism” had been too much discredited at the time, but they subsequently resumed it, for the logical conclusion of all socialism is communism. The word “collectivism,” says Paul Lafargue, was only invented in order to spare the susceptibilities of some of the more timorous. It is synonymous with the word “communism.” Every socialistic program, be it the program of St. Mandé, published in 1896 by Mr. Millerand, which lays down that “collectivism is the secretion of the capitalist régime,” or that of the Havre Congress, drawn up by Karl Marx, and carried on the motion of Jules Guesde, concludes with “the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to collective ownership of all the means of production.

These are terms of art, and some of the art is subterfuge. The general tenor of all socialistic thought is the replacement of private property and free exchange with public property and a command economy.

What we call it is less important than identifying its dangers.

twv

Categories Ideological currents, Quora, semantics

Designated Communists

July 12, 2021 //
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Calling others commies? It’s problematic; sure.

But there may be a rationale.

One way to designate someone as a communist despite their protests could be to define any leftist as a communist if he or she supports the psy-op subversion planks as explained by Yuri Bezmenov.

You may say you are, for example, a mere social democrat. But you also are obsessed with the issues that the Soviets materially and operationally advanced explicitly within their ranks as a means to export to the West to destroy your own country. So, despite any protest on your part, I’ll call you a commie.

Unless “Soviet” is accepted as fascistic and not commie.

But I think we should cede to extremists their own preferred terms, at least sometimes. Bear with me.

For example: I cede to anarchists of the anti-authoritarian violent-revolt variety — those who breed chaos and civil unrest, murder and mayhem and propaganda by the deed — with the term “anarchism,” and do not accept it as a term of peace. So, no matter how fascistic socialism and communism tend to become, I think we should give them their term, but with the pejorative twist: commie.

Commie is better than “communist,” actually, since communism has something to do with communes and communities, while “commie” is explicitly associated with the advance of subversion of liberal order.

I am a liberal, politically, above all else, I guess. And commies hate liberals. And liberals should hate commies.

twv

Categories Ideological currents, Lexicography

A Point of Clarification: Privilege

June 8, 2020 //
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It is not “privilege” to possess “justice.” If some people are treated justly and others aren’t, calling the former “privileged” corrupts the meaning of the terms.

And when the language becomes corrupt, the corrupt triumph while the innocent are abused — or are themselves corrupted.

Master Kung was right. Words matter. Whether through slovenliness or guile, when the meanings change of key words, we are endangered.

Semantic drift is like inflation: meaning shifts are like newly created money, the new meanings benefit early adopters at the expense of those late to the change.

If some are not treated justly, the proper response is not to attack the just as “privileged.” The proper response is to extend the reach of justice.

Word of caution, though: justice in society depends upon reciprocity.

Now, those who are indeed privileged at the expense of innocent victims, the abused, they should be subject to criticism, and their privileges taken away. Just do not pretend that privileges are justice. That is an excuse for injustice.

twv

Categories Basic Principles, Ethics, Ideological currents, Lexicography

Towards a Definition of Freedom and Liberty

March 31, 2020 //
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What is liberty?

…as answered on Quora….

Liberty is the freedom that can be had by all, provided each reciprocally abandons predation and parasitism (initiated force) and does not arrogate self over others, or allow others to tyrannize self.

Liberty — depending, as it does, upon the civilized stance, which is the cautious attitude of curiosity and the reserved expectation of peacefulness on the part of individuals, and which moderates the polarizing natural instincts of fight or flight — is the ideal compromise between dominance and submission, between tyranny and servility.

Or, to switch to the group level:

Liberty is a regulatory solution to the problems caused by in-group/out-group (inclusionary/exclusionary) antagonisms. It does this by regulating the ill treatment of the outsider, requiring a public test for applying coercion, based on the notions of rights/obligations and the suppression of crime and trespass. It applies the same sort of basic rule to all people, as individuals — regardless of group affiliation or institutional alliance.

Further formulations from alternative contexts:

Liberty is the replacement of militant coöperation with voluntary coöperation, understanding that peaceful non-coöperation is not a threat.

Liberty is the honing of threat systems down to a bare minimum by

  1. focusing on the prohibition of the initiation of force as well as by
  2. regarding as bedrock to social order self-defense, and by
  3. regulating retaliation by a rule of law —

all of which allows the flourishing of “enticement systems” (and the spontaneous systemization of flourishing).

Liberty, wrote Voltaire, is “independence backed by force.” While freedom is the absence of initiated opposing force, liberty is that absence grounded throughout society upon the justice of limiting “opposing force” to the defensive.

Liberty is reciprocity universalized, the Silver Rule scaled to all levels of organized society.

Liberty is a limit to government — with government understood in the broadest of social terms.

Liberty is a widespread and baseline personal freedom understood in the context of a distributed division of responsibility.

Dennis Pratt broke down the key concepts, above, into a nifty bullet-point list:

  • universal (for all)
  • civility
  • voluntary cooperation
  • reduced threats
  • defensive force
  • reciprocity
  • limited government
  • distributed responsibility

Categories Basic Principles, Ethics, Law, Lexicography, Political Theory, Quora, semantics
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