Targeting Old White Men (...every age has its fashionable prejudices)

Canada Free Press ^ | November 29, 2012 | Selwyn Duke

[Perseverando]

Who were all the great inventors, innovators, and philosophers? Who forged the West? Who birthed democracy? Who gave us our Constitution?

While modern society prides itself on being unbiased, it’s no exception to the rule that every age has its fashionable prejudices — and unfashionable people. Among the latter today are white men, and the closer they are to “dead white male” status, to use a favored leftist descriptive, the greater the disdain in which they’re held.

Thus do we see sneering at “old white men.” Earlier this year, Senator Harry Reid — one well acquainted through experience with old-white-male machinations — complained of “angry old white men” who bankroll conservative causes. More recently, the old-white-media paper the Guardian published a piece about America’s changing demographics titled, in part, “No country for angry old white men….” Ah, yes, it’s not just that they’re old, white, and men, that triad of turpitude. They’re “angry,” too. So just dismiss them out of hand, with their agenda born of blinding, irrational hatred. It’s another example of projection, from the group (leftists) that makes intellect-clouding emotionalism an art.

If we’re to define matters based on group identification, however — and the left makes clear we will — there is an irony here.

You could roughly say that old white men built the whole modern world.

You can precisely say this if you include in the category the budding old white men known as younger white men. Who were all the great inventors, innovators, and philosophers from ancient Greece and Rome up through medieval and modern Europe and the United States? Who forged the West? Who birthed democracy? Who improved upon it, giving us our Constitution and modern republican government? There is a reason why most of the busts and pictures of legendary figures portray

[Verginius Rufus]

Just like the English word "boor" originally meant farmer but came to be a term of disrespect, the word Boer can have evolved in its meaning.

I've never heard it said that "Serb" meant "sir."

The late Albert Bates Lord, better known for his work on oral poetry and Homer, recorded Serb, Bosnian, and Albanian oral poets in the former Yugoslavia (initially as an assistant to Milman Parry but he continued long after Parry's death in 1935). He wrote an introduction to the Serbo-Croatian language which has reading selections from a novel (in Serbian) which compared a Serb in Serbia to a Boer (this was at the time of the Boer War--one point of comparison was Serbia's struggle against the Turks being analogous to the Boers' struggle against the English, but this particular man was being compared to a Boer because he had a very large family like the Boers of that day). I forget the title--maybe something like "Boers and Englishmen."

[Beagle8U]

The smartest guy in that group was the one that turned the wheelbarrow around and hitched a donkey between the handles.

[Republican1795.]

I was not saying that you said that Serb meant sir but was just using an analogy because reducing a term to its roots often diminishes the fact that it might have since been expanded to denote an entire people or nation.

[uglybiker]

You forgot about the Blackstronauts. ;-)