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We Need To Learn To Speak Again
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18. II 2019
One avoids a lie whenever one can get away with truth (Borislav Pekic)
Why does it appear impossible to dispute obvious lies and falsehoods with simple and self-evident truths? It’s been more than two years since lies were set free. They have flooded the public discourse, politics, media and everyday life. Lies and falsehoods are neither exonerated, nor are they getting flushed out. They continue to pile
From measured, elegant and dignified presidential litotes in the brilliant oratory precision of a President Obama seeking to convey American leadership – to the bathetic crack-house milieu Caligula shambles of the GOPer-Scummo White House cesspool (pushing the wink-and-nod hitlerian shibboleths and stratagems to perilous Orwellian depths) – the precipice of protofascism has never in my lifetime been this short of a step into an existential democratic crisis in America.
Fortunately, Scummo’s manic megalomaniacal maw cannot yoke its childishly incontinent, mirror-whoring delusional gasconades; this is both his political hamartia and America’s Constitutional opportunity to bitch-slap the goose-stepping imperiousness back into a Democratically-kneecapped limp.
Still, the mephitic techno-social atmospheric media pollution – with rank unmitigated falsehood, canard, lie, and antithetical pogrom against reality, truth, and fact-based journalistic endeavor – is astounding to me. I know a number of smart, academically successful people, nee-Republican born again GOPers, who in the last two years have wallpapered their degrees over with pages of clinical dysfunction ripped right out of the DSM 5 in literal cognitive dissonance and info-wars ilk circle-jerking.
It’s scary. I’ve never before had an iota of doubt that America would remain a (relatively) free democratic republic based on what I thought were unalterable Constitutional principles of governing. For the first time in my life, I now have the first stitches of doubt; it won’t be Scummo and this incarnation of nihilistic GOPer dystopian populism that weaves together a fascist pall to corrupt our country: but without more laws of transparency, genuinely punitive ethical prosecutorial statutes, etc. – it has become distressingly obvious that an elitist covert plutocracy can – and will – subvert America as we know it; and for the most common of predatory failings: pure kleptocratic perfidy.
This article on the linguistic/semantical clusterfucking that has – incredibly – benighted reality even though it is more readily discoverable and available than ever before! – is something that everyone should be reading and pondering: from centerish-right, “independents”, ostensible mugwumps (yes, I’m excluding Scummo ilk MAGAts bc they’re committed propaganda dead-enders), all the way to the leftist-of-the-left (who need to do a much better job of marshaling optics vis-a-vis genuinely humanitarian utopian ideals).
Great inclusion, H.R.! I’m loving the paid subscription; I had no idea what I was missing.
At first I thought you were the author until a couple of para’s down.
This is a fantastic piece and a demonstration of why I subscribe. Bravo!
Bjarne is brilliant.
He reminds me of Christopher Hitchens.
What? No way. Hitchen’s was never that obscure.
Thank you. My chief concern is that a huge percentage of the common people with 4th grade language skills and empty heads who respond positively to the Scummo’s lies won’t be able to pronounce the words much less understand the message. They are clueless but not without worth if the lies are laid bare and the truth pushed forward in terms they can understand. They don’t realize the Pied Piper is leading them to the precipice. Can we afford to let them be led away?
“entrepreneurs who offer the empty surfaces of coherently articulated speech to anyone who wishes to be concealed behind them. The real attraction of the linguistic commodities offered for sale by these characters is represented less by their logically valid surfaces than by the dark space behind those surfaces where customers can settle comfortably.”
Sorry, gibberish. If the author wants to be understood he better make sure he choses better words than – the empty surfaces of coherently articulated speech – for anyone to understand a meaning that is, coherent. I do not think ’empty’ and ‘coherent’ comport.
Well I guess H ….. in his goodnight post managed to bring out the philosopher and memories of our college days, paraphrased with illusions of our great vocabularies in all of us ……night all.
Holy shirtballs. I needs me some covefefe
Much appreciated, Bjarne and H; well worthy of the subscription. It appears we are witnessing a nearly perfect apotheosis of the abuse of language, and to see into this phenomenon is to see into the context that has sowed its seeds however long ago. Is language not abused in the process of turning ideas into beliefs into reductive religions, secular or otherwise, that are resistant to critique qua religions because they create meaning and identity? Modigliani has long been one of the (secular) prophets of the dominant reductive religion. Insofar as money/capital is believed to create meaning, won’t it abuse language like any other reductive religion, Communism included? Aren’t reductive religious tenets used as foundations for building elaborate languages that can appear more “logical” and “meaningful” the more all-encompassing and elaborate they become?
I agree that we need a linguistic revolution. And am reminded of something Wittgenstein compellingly demonstrated – language is learned by belief, which comes before doubt. Obviously doubt comes before change.