Lies, Damned lies and Change of Meaning

Patrons are well used to calling a spade a spade and a long glass of cold humility, cold humility. But outside in the Village the population struggles with more re-naming of things and concepts than you will find in Wales or on Tasmanian roads.

The Americans are world leaders in Cultural Marxist confabulation, starting first a few decades ago with Feminism, rapidly spreading all over, throughout the schools Universities and now in Government.

Charles Krauthammer came by to tell us of a few examples of sheer mendacity:

 Jen Psaki, blameless State Department spokeswoman, explained that the hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but “a reduction in staff.”  

This proved a problem because the Yemeni government had already announced (and denounced) the “evacuation” — the word normal folks use for the panicky ordering of people onto planes headed out of the country.

Thus continues the administration’s penchant for wordplay, the bending of language to fit a political need.  

In Janet Napolitano’s famous formulation, terror attacks are now “man-caused disasters.”  

And the “global war on terror” is no more. It’s now an “overseas contingency operation.” 

Nidal Hasan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. But the massacre remains officially classified as an act not of terrorism but of “workplace violence.” 

The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others are killed in an al-Qaeda-affiliated terror attack — and for days it is waved off as nothing more than a spontaneous demonstration gone bad.  

After all, famously declared Hillary Clinton, what difference does it make? 

 Well, it makes a difference,  

first, because truth is a virtue.  

Second, because if you keep lying to the American people, they may seriously question whether anything you say — for example, about the benign nature of NSA surveillance — is not another  

Self-Serving Lie.

And third, because leading a country through yet another long twilight struggle requires not just honesty but clarity.  

This is a president who to this day cannot bring himself to identify the enemy as radical Islam. Just Tuesday night, explaining the U.S. embassy closures across the Muslim world, he cited the threat from “violent extremism.” 

The word “extremism” is meaningless.  

People don’t devote themselves to being extreme. Extremism has no content. The extreme of what? I 

n this war, an extreme devotion to the supremacy of a radically fundamentalist vision of Islam and to its murderous quest for dominion over all others. 

 But for President Obama, the word “Islamist” may not be uttered. 

Language must be devised to disguise the unpleasantness. 

 Result?  

The world’s first lexicological war.  

Parry and thrust with linguistic tricks, deliberate misnomers and ever more transparent euphemisms.

 

Next:  armor-piercing onomatopoeias  

and amphibious synecdoches.

 
Charles has more at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-obama-distorts-reality-with-language/2013/08/08/22652cf6-006b-11e3-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story.html

 
James E. Miller chipped in with an even more personally directed example.

I am a chair. Don’t believe me? Well, you are simply blinded by cultural oppression that distorts reality in favor of snobbish patriarchy. 

As a human being, I have the freedom to choose who or what I want to be – and I wish to be known as a chair.  

Saying I am wrong affects me not. I will refuse to listen if you point out my biological makeup is totally different than that of a sitting instrument.  

My independent mind has been cut loose from the umbilical cord of bourgeois reasoning and I am now at liberty to declare what I am, regardless of objection. For I am no longer a “he” but rather, a more reputable “it.”  

Behold, the glories of my rigid staleness as I am now one with the chair. 

If you believe the above satirical diatribe is too fantastical to be taken seriously, the case of a transgendered Californian high school student is not much different.  

The U.S. Department of Justice recently settled with the Arcadia, California school district over the alleged sexual discrimination of a girl-turned-boy who felt they were treated unfairly.  

The contention is this student, who was born a female but now decides she (he?) is a male, was prohibited from using the restroom of their choice.  

On a school-sponsored camping trip, the self-identified lad engaged in a fit of righteous indignation over not being allowed to sleep in a cabin with her fellow compadres. 

It would be one thing if the student in question had undergone the necessary surgery to become a male. It would be another if there was  

verifiable proof of the transgender condition.

Apparently realistic expectations are not the forte of the enlightened gender thinkers in California. The student identifies as a male despite not having the requisite anatomy.  

And it’s because of this explicit choice that rejects the nature of outer biology, everyone around him/her must change their behaviour to adapt.  

The student was not being harassed or bullied.  

This was an issue of everyone not forcibly joining in someone’s varied imagination.

Follow his discussion:  http://mises.ca/posts/blog/comfortableness-with-natural-law/



Why do people tell lies?

It distorts reality.

A person tells a lie for one of just two reasons.

a) To gain power over another.

b) to evade the consequence of their own behaviour.

I will leave you to think about what the motives for all of the above examples might be. The choices are easy enough. a) or b).

Meanwhile I will pull some pints of Integrity and several Authenticity cocktails.