We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
Economics |
Samizdata quote of the day – the Year ReheatedDecember 26th, 2024 |
 12 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – the Year ReheatedLeave a Reply |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Thanks very much for the signal boost. Hopefully, there’s something in there for everyone.
But you know, I do sense that the zeitgeist is turning once again, and decidedly not to the advantage of the Juan P. Madrids of this world.
Blimey, I’d forgotten the needlessly violent astronomy terms.
On a related topic, apparently the Russian words for “black hole” are used as a direct calque of the English term to describe the astronomical phenomenon, but are also used for a part of female anatomy.
Does anyone else have that thing where you question your memories of long ago, because surely no one would have been that crazy? I do this when I remember family outings when six or seven children were all put in one car, two of them in the place in the back usually occupied by a dog. My immediate family didn’t have a car, so any car journey was a slightly unusual event, and I didn’t think of my travelling crouched in the boot as much more unusual.
Anyway, people twenty years from now will need to check their memories of the woke era in much the same way, only without the pleasant nostalgia.
Natalie @2:25pm,
I suspect (hope!) you’re right about the view backwards 20 years from now. But I also worry that some of the wokeness will have been insinuated into at least our language if not our rules and regs. And like much of our language, its origins unknown to its practitioners.
But set aside “20 years from now”, how much woke terminology is already sewn into our language such that even with a rollback of the trans insanity as well as, hopefully, the ravings of this good professor of Astronomy, we are already stuck with a somewhat diminished language and culture?
That is, can we really roll this back completely? The answer is obviously ‘no’ since no such event such as the “woke era” can ever be undone fully.
So the real question is can the main cultural damage be reversed?
The damage will ironically be reversed due to the unstoppable influx of an equally determined but far more combative (as opposed to merely argumentative) ideology.
“We” will remain on the sidelines as powerless to stop the coming cultural change as we already are of the arguably less threatening one. We will however have to learn to take the knee, metaphorically if not physically, to confirm our submission to a very different set of values.
No: the real question is can the brain damage be reversed?
And the answer is yes (partially); but only if the brain-damaged want to.
Maybe ‘we’, or the powers that may be, need to be far more elitist about the number and nature of universities. The amount of infantile and/or stupid stuff in and around them is presumably very damaging for intellectual development. The descent of the Scientific American should by itself raise alarm about the loss to society that is taking place.
FrankS @5:27pm, “…raise alarm about the loss to society that is taking place.”
Ah, but that’s part of the problem: many of us see that loss in the present and in the likely future but do the editors of Scientific American? So, with whom should this alarm be raised? Certainly not with those with mainstream power or influence. Certainly not with my Congressional delegation–I live in Washington State. And certainly not with the permanent bureaucracy in “the other Washington” that runs my country’s government and more and more runs my country.
I think the alarm is fully raised on this blog and in many other places. So, where else might we try to raise this alarm to reach sufficient numbers of people to achieve a tipping point?
I suspect many of you in the Samizdata blogosphere are already doing this…would you be so kind as to make a list for me? That is, each of you provide one list item; maybe others here will be surprised at where and how this alarm is already being raised, or tried to.
Thank you.
Wear a MAGA cap. I find that this gives me many opportunities to discuss governing philosophy with strangers.
And I’m only partly joking about this. I think that people go to media and websites and crowds to reinforce their existing philosophies – we all end up mostly preaching to our own choirs – but true changing of minds is usually done one-on-one.
But still, it helps to bring a larger friend with you. 😉
In the 1980s people laughed at “Political Correctness gone mad” – that was a mistake, a double mistake.
First it is not, and never was, harmless fun – it is deadly serious, an effort to control language and thought (yes thought) and to utterly exterminate dissent. Nor is it a matter of “going mad”, being taken to an extreme, it was wrong (evil) in-principle, by its very nature.
It is Frankfurt School Marxism (“Critical Theory”) and you destroy it, or it destroys you.
And people who dare not use the “M word” (Marxism) and pretend this is all just silly piece of harmless fun, are much of the reason it became so powerful.
You destroy it or it destroys you.
You can not peacefully coexist with someone like Professor Madrid – because he is fanatically determined to exterminate all dissent, to exterminate you.
You get rid of him – or he will get rid of you.
Gate Keep, Gate Keep, Gate Keep – if someone is a Critical Theory supporter, do not hire them, and if they have (somehow) got into your organisation, dismiss them at once – or they will soon get to a position where they can force you out (even if you are supposedly in charge of the organisation).
There can be no peaceful coexistence with such Critical Theory (Frankfurt School Marxist) types – it is them or you.
I’ve never met a guy more in need of a blow job than the aforementioned Juan P. Madrids.
He definitely needs to get out a bit more at night.
People make fun of the trope that “1984 wasn’t meant as an instruction manual!”
But, in truth, it was an extremely precise exposition on the Marxist instruction manual.
If we no longer have any words that can express racism or sexism or whatever-ism, then the ism’s themselves will disappear.
That’s the goal and the justification. I think it’s pure cargo-cultism, but they’re still trying.