What a week.
For starters - some of the rants ettled for posting here did not make it.
Died a swift death on the vine.
One dealt with swindling get-rich-quick schemes I have come across over the years, some of which work fast and so incredibly seamlessly well. From hardscrabble gaberlunzie, perhaps, to well-respected socialite millionaire within three-odd months. Fat facile pickings, a snap to emulate. Post such schemes in all their glory here? Nah. More.....
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What a week.
For starters - some of the rants ettled for posting here did not make it.
Died a swift death on the vine.
One dealt with swindling get-rich-quick schemes I have come across over the years, some of which work fast and so incredibly seamlessly well. From hardscrabble gaberlunzie, perhaps, to well-respected socialite millionaire within three-odd months. Fat facile pickings, a snap to emulate. Post such schemes in all their glory here? Nah.
Next.
In a land far away from here - surprisingly, not the US. - lawyers are aplenty and as hardscrabble as they come.
Then, their hungry kind hit upon an idea. Oh, such a good idea - simple, neat, eath. Overnight, innumerable stalwart upstanding burghers of said faraway land started finding in their letter boxes - along perhaps with their morning paper and the usual bills and junk - new, unexpected bills, binding for thousands of dollars, meted out for inadvertent and quite immaterial trespasses.
Lawyers began eating and feasting again - and rejoiced amain.
Tip off lawyers as to how to do that here? Don't think so. Post gave up the ghost, died swiftly.
We want to be nice ! We want to be PC! Political correctness rules !
So much can be said perhaps for PC-ness: in its best behaviour, it wants you to be fair and nice to all.
PC leads to democratization, a key part of which is not being judgmental.
In the West, so-called Christian churches have for aeons ingrained horrid, meddlesome finger-wagging judgmentalism into the very weft of our souls and minds, stunting countless lives in the process. Notions of judgement, of sin, of petty arbitrary imperatives as to how to conduct the last insignificant details of one's life have held sway - lest an intolerant, dim narrow-minded God pass absurd judgment on us and resort to torture.
Farther afield, the world over, and in Europe too during the Inquisition and in times of religious wars, witless human sacrifice in one form or another has been rife for countless years.
We perhaps stand in dire need of PC-ness.
Not convinced? Here goes.
We just know that we are superior to horses, elephants, and/or dogs, don't we - but sorry - it's not true in respects that count.
Horses, elephants and dogs have never held sacrifices of members of their own species. We are the only species to have practiced, apart from the wholescale slaughter of our contemporaries, organized and codified human sacrifice. Not only the Aztecs and Mayas in their grisly religious rites, not only as described in the Bible in many passages, but everywhere and almost everywhen.
Look around for the coolest (neo)religion today, inhale a bit of incense and listen to George Harrison sing and Richard Gere or Whoopi Goldberg talk: a strong case can be made that Tibetan Buddhism fits the bill for tolerance and intelligence. Would the Tibetans then perhaps be made of a better fiber than the rest of us, thus somehow redeeming us?
Nah. Bön, the religion that preceded the advent of Buddhism in Tibet, involved human sacrifice. Yet again. I'm telling you: we might be just plain awful. A bunch of oogah oogahs.
Beware the religious man. PC shields us from him.
PC leads to democratization, to broader acceptance of our real or perceived foibles - at its best, thwarts the profoundly objectionable.
And just like that - poof, the law of unintended consequences rears its ugly and silly gurning head: gone is, for instance, the era of Patrician presidents in the US, noblesse-oblige leaders à la Woodrow Wilson or Roosevelt. Gone is, in wide swathes of a PC world, the era of striving for excellence.
Now is the era of the undemanding man, of the common man president.
Democratization sometimes equates dumbing down.
Microsoft's foray into areas they know nothing about results for instance in the publication of the Encarta Dictionary. In its 'mankind' entry - a word with a noble pedigree, a word engraved on a plaque affixed to a lander leg of Apollo 11 ("We Come in Peace for All Mankind"), and many other such great uses - the Encarta says "a word considered offensive".
What ?
Ladies and Gentlemen, friends and neighbours - go check your shelves now: should they carry the Encarta: pull it out, go to the chute, and hurl it down to exactly where it belongs.
Gone also is tough but fair grading in schools - in Sweden, marks have been abolished altogether.
At Harvard University, papers that only shine by their absence of any discernible merit and which may become some day exhibits for muddled thought, now routinely rate a B minus or a C plus instead of the F minus and the upbraiding they once used to incur.
Is this what the dems, the democrats, wanted?
Damn!
Dems :
Dim?
Dumb?
Doom ? That's not what we bargained for.
Since George Orwell's masterwork, '1984', we know that manipulation of the language is the Dictator's favorite way of distorting, constraining, encaging, and channeling thought.
PC-ness limits the language - perfectly good words such as deaf and blind ridiculously becoming hearing-impaired and visually-challenged - and it reeks of thought control, of dictatorship, of dumbing down the people and removing their freedom of judgment and decision, so that they become passive consumers for the greater good.
Could a bit of insidious dictatorship actually be all to the good ? Perhaps the good people, when left to their own devices, come up with bad ideas, stinking isms, they believe anything, and cannot be trusted with their own lives and welfare?
At least this seems to be what the leaders of the European Union have concluded: even as they reintroduce through the backdoor all of the elements of the European Constitutional Treaty that had been so soundly rejected by the voters of both France and the Netherlands (and was headed for more rejection in further referendums, such as in the UK) - the European governments have learnt their lesson: they will never ask the people again. And perhaps - in a continent that started two World Wars and invented a number of unsavory isms, can we totally blame them?
Limiting words, thought, freedom and independent judgment. In George Orwell's bleak fiction, and in the real world too.
When Germany sundered into West Germany and East Germany between 1949 and 1990, the German Language's then equivalent to the Oxford English Dictionary was the Duden.
Along with Germany itself, the Duden rived into distinct Western and Eastern versions. Soon, the Eastern version not only did not include thousands of words - the words themselves had been purged out of the language by the totalitarian Communist masters of the East - but furthermore bent or wholly redefined the meanings of words too common to be wholly expunged: for instance, under 'Freiheit' - freedom - the Eastern version of the Duden helpfully explained that freedom was "the control of the means of production by workers' soviets (committees)"
Does not Bill Gates's Encarta tread a bit the same path?
Before we leave Germany - let's look at it today.
Despite what everybody says, German is not a complicated language. It has far fewer words than the English lexicon (nothing special or surprising here - for 2 confluent separate classes of historical reasons, English boasts by very far the largest lexicon of any language on Earth - bar none). Although its grammar is extensive, it is extremely logical, and it is spelt phonetically (as is, say, Spanish, and not either French or let alone English.)
In other words, it is impossible to make a spelling error in German. No can do.
Well, lo and behold : German has just changed itself officially, in a reform of the language and of its spelling dictated from on high (the "Rechtschreibreform") - to make it simpler !!!! It simply committed a form of mild cultural suicide. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, a beautiful, ancient Euro-classical language has just deliberately dumbed itself down to accommodate the illiterate, the dumb, the lame, the halt and the blind.
Let's heave a sigh of relief that, democratic as we are, we do not even have an authority who could by peremptory fiat and diktat order us the way our language ought to be spoken and spelt. And if anyone tried that here - they'd be laughed out of court.
My Teutonic friends - where is the laughter, the writhing on the floor?
The frightening thing is - instead of revolting, of telling their authorities where to get off, most Germans just went along, obediently louting again to perceived authority - is it me, or are they just plain much too wont to do exactly that?
PC does victims too. Because PC-ness forbids that traditions be broken, lest we offend the concerned, horrid traditions in the Faoe islands (senseless and useless traditional slaughter of porpoises), in Spain (hurling pets to their deaths), in Africa and elsewhere abide to this day.
And so on.
Is there an alternative between current man - often unpredictable, infuriating, pig-headed, sometimes delusional, sometimes genocidal, sometimes brilliant beyond words, or do we want to be engineered into a dumber , bridled newman, a limpishdick rote robotic pavlov dog-like exclusive consumer of PC memes, a safe ready daily user of ready-to-think along with his ready-to-wear?
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