Posted on 10/24/2019 4:05:41 AM PDT by Kaslin
In the Bible, the people of Babel unite in fighting God; they decide to build a massive tower to challenge God's supremacy. God, annoyed by their presumption, promptly causes them to speak a variety of tongues, dividing them and ending the foolhardy project.
The story represents a simple truth: unity relies, at least in large part, on shared language.
In the United States, we're watching our shared language disintegrate.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump fired off one of his infamously impassioned tweets about the Democrats' impeachment inquiry. Frustrated by Democrats' lack of clarity on process with regard to that inquiry, Trump wrote: "So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here -- a lynching. But we will WIN!"
Trump's use of the word "lynching" immediately set off a firestorm. Characteristic among denunciations was one from former Vice President Joe Biden, who imperiously intoned: "Our country has a dark, shameful history with lynching, and to even think about making this comparison is abhorrent. It's despicable."
There was just one problem: Biden used the exact same language in October 1998 to describe the Clinton impeachment. "History is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching," Biden said back then. Which prompted Biden -- today's Biden -- to condemn himself, stating: "That wasn't the right word to use and I'm sorry about that. Trump on the other hand chose his words deliberately today in his use of the word lynching and continues to stoke racial divides in this country daily."
Oh.
So when Joe Biden used the word "lynching" to describe his perception of a politically motivated impeachment in 1998, that was merely poor word choice. When Trump used it in 2019, he obviously meant to liken himself to black victims of white supremacist violence.
Or, alternatively, everyone is full of it.
Politics is wildly skewing our use of basic language. And that phenomenon is one of the key factors tearing apart the country. Every word becomes a potential dog whistle. Every phrase is parsed by the politically motivated for signs of malign intent. Politically correct language policing becomes the order of the day. Misunderstanding becomes malice; clarity becomes confusion.
The deliberate confusion fostered regarding gender pronouns is yet another example of this phenomenon. It is not a sign of malice to suggest that gender pronouns refer to objective measures of sex. It is a sign of a delusional culture to suggest that third party use of gender pronouns must refer instead to subjective self-identification. Yet we are told that virtue mandates that we pretend that transgender women are women, even if that means that biological men compete with biological women in sport; we are told that virtue requires that parents call their confused 7-year-olds by their chosen pronouns, even though confused children desperately require guidance, love and advice from parents, not mere affirmation of malleable self-identification.
We cannot have conversations with one another if we refuse to define terms. But refusal to define terms is one of the most fruitful methods of impugning others. If we seek division rather than unity, we'll certainly find it. And as we cordon ourselves off into separate interpretations of language we once held in common, we're less and less likely to ever again find common ground.
Yes, Ben, but once again you over intellectualize the problem. The Democrats, the left, are crazy dishonest trouble makers of the highest order. They deserve no more linguistic correction than the forcefully spoken “F off!”.
Stop coddling child abusers and political charlatans. Denounce them and trounce them.
One of the hallmarks of domestic abusers is that they purposefully shatter the victim’s reality by telling them things that are not true. This is done to undermine the victim’s sense of reality, to make them self-doubt.
The left’s purpose in redefining every word and looking for ways to make innocent words offensive is the same. They are abusively seeking to undermine their targets’ sense of reality in order to exert control.
On this note, does anyone know how the word “Oriental” suddenly became racist and offensive? I know it is a part of the left’s constant effort to undermine language and culture, but when and how did they pull this one off? And has anyone ever challenged a leftist to explain why it is racist to call people “Oriental” (referring to a cardinal direction) but not to call them “Asian” (referring to a continent)?
Ben Shapiro, the one who endorsed Michelle Field’s accusation that Corey Lewandowski knocked her to the ground.
Shapiro is not an honest broker himself.
In this piece, he offers no thoughts about how to counter or remedy the abuse of language, no suggestion about how to reframe debate, to avoid the all too common traps of arguing over labels and chasing red-herrings (facts that don’t determine the outcome, like “hearsay” in whisleblowing or “secret” in conducting investigations, but are treated as determining the outcome).
Uh, he did just that.
He identified them as destroying the culture.
Is it over-intellectualizing the problem, or just monetizing it? Looks like the old Conservative, Inc. model — make a comfortable living chatting up the destruction of civilization. Get it while you can, I guess.
I watched an American of Japanese ancestry ask that question on a forum with plenty of woke Leftists. She’s well-regarded there. She never did get a good answer. She did get attacked by one guy basically for not being woke enough.
Aside from the fact that Shapiro was anti Trump during the campaign in 16 his voice bugs me. Maybe he should take some testosterone to deepen his voice.
It has become impossible to talk to the Left. It’s not worth the effort.
Otherwise known as “gaslighting”.
“Lynch” is a well known common surname which originates in Ireland.
Not a thing wrong with the word.
And there is no question in my mind that Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi and the entire democrat party is so absent in effective policy for America, that they use the social mechanisms of branding, belittling, and sanctioning , a social mechanism employed historically by racists. These really dirty dems have no where to go, so they use the social mechanisms of racism to make President Trump into a modern day white nigger.
The Pelosi crowd expect Black folk to pile on in prejudice to the new Presidential Nigger, but the fact is that President Trump is the best thing to happen to the Black community since emancipation. And the Black community knows a nigger when they see one created, and they identify with President Trump. President Trump truly loves America’s black community.
Right now PDJT has the support of 25% of the Black Community in the USA. Due to the Democrats creating our President as a white nigger, the black support will increase to well over 50% in this next year.
And President Trump, “Tote dat barge!Lif’ dat bale!”
Ole Man River is swinging it your way brother!
We love you.Right now.
We will fight these dirty dems until they have to reach out of their own coffins to nail themselves in.
It all started when the man in Washington, D.C., referred to “niggardly,” meaning stingy, but a word unknown to the American people.
When you allow them to dictate you get labeled too
He hit it out of the park. Whoever controls the language controls the conversation and sets the ground rules for discussion. By letting the Left manipulate the language to their liking we have yielded the field to them for going on 50 years. Every issue is discussed using their interpretation of the meanings of the words being used. Probably the best example is the word ‘Gay’. There is nothing ‘Gay’ about the perverted lifestyle of homosexuals, but partly because we are all lazy and ‘Gay’ is shorter than homosexual, but mostly because that is the word the left has taught is the proper word to describe the lifestyle we all use it. Yes we all know what it means, but doesn’t the word ‘Gay’ give the lifestyle a more benign aura to it than homosexual or sodomite? The are many others such words, for example, (and this might get me censored even on this conservative site) but Blacks are given free range to use the word ‘nigger’, but let a white person or a conservative Black person use it, even in a scholarly dissertation, and they can lose their livelihood.
Mr. Shapiro is dead on in his appraisal, and sadly it is, like so many others, a battle in the culture wars we’ve already lost.
No, he did not. He was referring to a murder committed by an enraged mob, which is what a lynching is, or at least was until this past week. Only in the fall of 2019 did "to lynch" become an exclusively racial term.
I was surprised to read this on Townhall, just as I was a few minutes ago when I read a Townhall article attacking President Trump for pulling out of the war zone in Syria. What’s becoming of Townhall? Are they going the way of National Review and Drudge and sinking into the swamp?
If "oriental" is racist, then so is its counterpart, "occidental." Therefore, Occidental College, the alma mater of Barack Obama (and yours truly) needs to change its name.
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