Kakistocracy has an essay about the pretend-plasticity of language in the current cultural assault. While true, it's rather short-sighted.
If one had even the barest of educations not under the rubric of Common Core (which is neither), they would know that the question of language and its pliability was settled decisively by no less a literary light than Lewis Carroll, in Through The Looking Glass, circa 1871:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."In short, words mean things, and any exercise to stretch them is but a pretext to usurp power, then, now, always.
But power doesn't flow from dictionaries, else librarians would rule the world, and everything in life would be filed alphabetically according to the Dewey Decimal system, and likewise run in precisely laid-out tracks.
Reality is somewhat more brutal and realistic.
A commenter to K-blog noted afterwards:
The Overton window has moved almost exclusively left. It used to be considered patently absurd that two men would be ‘married’. Now any objection to such things is considered absurd in polite society. The goalposts are constantly moved. And they always move left.
Again, that's false, and tragically myopic.
Overton Windows have a nasty habit of ending up in heaps of charred rubbish after some thoughtful souls decide “Enough of this claptrap” and helpfully burn the entire block to the ground, relishing the screams of those happily nailed up inside.
Brighter lights can learn from this lesson, and profit thereby, or else prepare for Ascension Day, when they go up the chimney after making ashes of themselves.
Pendulums don’t swing only one way, and humanity is not naturally wont to swing leftwards at all, let alone perpetually. And history’s default model isn’t a steak BBQ where everyone gets along, it’s a stake dinner, with troublemakers securely tied to it, and gloriously aflame.
Bet on human nature every time.
Everything reverts to the mean eventually, and the next reversion promises to pretty damned mean.
The day is coming - and not like a freight train, but like the TGV at speed - when you're either going to grasp those cultural and political realities, and take up the power you surrendered to those who've proven hopelessly unworthy to wield it, or else be beaten down by those who do.
You're not only going to have to reacquaint yourself with where food comes from, rather than consuming it third- or more-hand away, prepared and borne to your table by seven layers of others, but you're also going to have to re-acquaint yourself with how political power is produced, refined, directed, and applied, at the pointy end, and at levels beyond fines for overdue library books.
To be blatantly explicit:
Exactly like E=MC² , the equation runs in both directions.
I.e. politics is also a continuation of war, by other means.
You're either going to grasp that, and apply it, or else be one of those to whom it is applied.
In exactly the same way you're either giving a whipping in the woodshed, or receiving it.
The other side has pursued their Long March through cultural institutions, while you and your fathers and grandfathers retreated, to business, consumerism, escapism, or whatever.
Now, you're paying for generations of disregard by having your nose rubbed in the dominant culture, which is no longer yours. In fact, impatient for the final chapter, they're importing other cultures to literally rub yours out, onesie-twosie now, and soon, on a genocidal scale.
"Bosnia, times Rwanda." - Matt Bracken
It's merely a matter of decimal places.
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| Totalitarian Math 101 |
You have few choices: surrender and immediate extermination, dhimmitude and slow extermination, or to awaken from a century-long slumber, discover for what use your parts were made, and restore what never should have been in question to primacy in civilization. All of those choices will hurt, all of them will be costly, and all of them will exact a toll compounded by the interest on decades of neglect, but in only one case is the juice worth the squeeze.
You're going to have to fight. You're going to have kill people, and break things.
You're going to have to unleash a battlefield in your own city, town, and front yard.
Or you're going to be cannon fodder for those who won't hesitate to do it to you.
Fatalists and defeatists should simply STFU and kill themselves, the sooner that those of us left afterwards can split their gear and redistribute their weapons and ammunition. This is a cultural war of survival, to the death, and only one side will remain after it's over. And those that relish the conflagration for its own sake are your enemies as well. You're either going to fight to re-establish civilization, or you're just another sick arsonist waiting for the go-ahead. If the latter, by all means, set yourselves on fire too, now; we neither need you, nor want you.
And for the record, this kicked off over 100 years ago, just not with battles and bayonets, and for most of that time, our side has been a conscious and deliberate no-show. Damned few write, fewer still do it well, and most don't draw, paint, sculpt, compose music, tell jokes, act, make films, or do anything much to advance the culture at all, and pound in its foundations, despite the fact that politics is downstream from culture, yet are all shocked as all get out that it continually slaps them in the face with the wet codfish of reality that "they didn't build that". The stream drives the mill wheel, not the other way around, but nobody wants to find out who dammed things up, and getting anyone to dredge out the sludge in the cultural channel and haul away the accumulated alluvial accretions of slime, from a century and more's neglect of reality, is like pulling teeth, or trying to get people to grow a second head. Now we can all reap the harvest of that foolishness and sloth.
It's still something that can be waged culturally - for the moment - but the other side, tired of being thwarted by human nature, and the bent of mankind not to play their silly-ass games, is about to revert to their default, which is killing the hundreds of millions of non-conformists to their policies, because they secretly hate themselves, and they're killing everyone else is punishment for the crime of your would-be rulers' birth.
They're quite simply mad (and I mean that properly, in a clinically psychotic way, not a state of anger), and rather than doing the honorable thing, and committing suicide for their own sins, they've decided they'd rather kill you to assuage their own guilt - for being born.
There are two paths to human perfection. Rational beings admit their imperfections, and humbly seek to improve themselves, and improve the lot of those they can affect out of their own means. Delusional monsters myopically decide that they must kill the imperfect, always stopping short of themselves, and appropriating the loot mainly for their own pleasure, to convince themselves that they deserve it, because of your evil, while distributing a few crumbs to their cronies. Witness Venezula for only the most recent chapter in that sad volume. And as always, they do it upwind of the piles of corpses, because the stench of that reality crashes their delusions in one whiff, and their heads explode in impotent rage. And because the corpses stink, and they're evil and insane, but not stupid.
I coined the phrase "As crazy as they have to be", for homeless guys screaming to the heavens to get a movie location manager to give them more money to shut up while we were filming, who suddenly and near-magically discovered the blessings of silence when threatened with judicious application of a PR-24 and jail instead of being rewarded with another sawbuck. They're crazy, but not stupid.
Societies, alas, will need more than just a baton to the head to get their attention, and a night in the tank to rethink their life choices.
And it's not going to stay a battle of just words for much longer (and indeed, those mooring lines of civilization fray thinner by the hour). "Speaking the truth" isn't going to be verbal.
It isn't going to come from your mouth. It's going to have to come out of the barrel of a gun.
You can deny that reality, but you won't be able to deny the consequences of denying that reality. Oh, and you're probably going to end up dead if you try, and likely with a stupid surprised look on your face, and an extra eye in your forehead.
You're watching, on a culture-wide scale, what I see night after night in ERs all over town:
what happens when actual reality doesn't conform to someone's psychotic delusions, and the predictable escalation of madness when we tell a batshit crazy patient "No!".
In my case, I have help, sedatives, and hard restraints to enforce a modicum of order on the insane.
But when an entire civilization loses its mind, as you've been watching yours do for your entire life, and it finally comes at you, you're only going to have one option: like Atticus Finch and a mad dog,
you're going to have to put the sumbitch down, yourself.
And in exactly the same way:
Because if you don't, it isn't going to quit, or go away. Like the T-800 series,
"Listen, and understand! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
Word.
Challenge accepted?
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