RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/word-games-and-fake-diversity-left-bruce-thornton/

Years ago at a block party in my old neighborhood, my next-door neighbor, a Mexican-American named Lawrence, introduced himself to a new resident, a white self-proclaimed activist lawyer. “No, no!” she scolded him. “Lorenzo!”

The chutzpah of a white woman telling a Mexican-American man how to say his own name still epitomizes for me the white elite Left’s obtuseness about their own patronizing arrogance, particularly when it comes to the ethnic “other” they supposedly champion. And it also reveals the way identity politics uses language to encode its reduction of complex, unique individuals into crude political caricatures that they label “diversity.”

I remembered this encounter last week when I read about a poll that found only 2% of Hispanics/Latinos used the clunky neologism “Latinx,” and 40% are offended by it.  Invented by mostly white, university educated “woke” activists and race-mongers, the word is a virtue-signaling totem for the Left’s exquisite sensitivity to how language allegedly reinforces sexism in order to further the nefarious designs of the “patriarchy” that, as the cliché goes, wants to keep women, especially women “of color,” “pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen.”

In the case of “Latinx,” the “woke” complaint is that “Latino” is a masculine noun, and so its use to describe people of both sexes is demeaning and exclusive of Latina women. But this pretext assumes that native speakers of Spanish, or any other European gendered dialect of Latin, will hear the word and immediately think of males and notice the exclusion of females.

Similarly, grammatical usage such as defaulting to the masculine when describing mixed-sex groups has been so common for so many centuries that most native speakers won’t even notice a word’s gender, any more than they think about biological males and females when they hear masculine or feminine nouns that have nothing to do with biological sex. It’s doubtful that a Spanish-speaker thinks the word for song, “canción,” which is feminine, has some meaningful connection to women or is exclusive of males.

The politico-linguistic dynamic behind “Latinx” was started by feminism over half a century ago in the case of the English suffix “-man” to describe a non sex specific activity or profession. Until feminist activists started complaining, most speakers of English would hear a word like “chairman,” “spokesman,” or “Congressman,” and would not notice its biological sex implications any more than they would other suffixes like “-ing” or “-ed.” Moreover, the same tenacity of usage, the power of linguistic habit that makes grammatical gender unexceptional, explains why words in English like “human” and “woman,” despite the efforts of feminist language commissars, are still in common use.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-and-on-and-on-11639523755?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The chair of the South African Medical Association, who helped alert the world to Covid’s Omicron variant, is still trying to persuade the British government not to panic about it. Dr. Angelique Coetzee writes this week in the Daily Mail:

As a general practitioner for more than 33 years, I am one of the foot soldiers who sees patients first. We clinicians deal day-to-day with real people, not statistical projections, and I can reassure you that the symptoms presenting in those with Omicron are very, very mild compared with those we see with the far more dangerous Delta variant…
In the part of South Africa where I work, there haven’t been many patients admitted to hospital with Omicron, and most have been treated at home, using anti-inflammatories, such as ibuprofen, and low doses of cortisone.
Bear in mind, too, that most of those who contract Omicron here are unvaccinated (only 26 per cent of South Africans are fully vaccinated). While this is certainly not an argument against vaccination — I cannot stress the importance of that enough — it’s reassuring to know that even unprotected bodies fight off this variant much more easily than Delta. Current data indicates that the majority of cases admitted to ICUs are unvaccinated people.

Meanwhile in Washington, government medical authorities are sounding especially fearful again. The Washington Post’s Lena Sun, Joel Achenbach, Laurie McGinley and Tyler Pager report today:

Top federal health officials warned in a briefing Tuesday morning that the omicron variant is rapidly spreading in the United States and could peak in a massive wave of infections as soon as January, according to new modeling from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/15/bidens-build-back-better-lie-revealed-5-tril-isnt-zero/

President Joe Biden and other Democrats have smugly responded “zero” or “nothing” when asked what the massive Build Back Better plan will ultimately cost. Not to be rude, but this is an outright lie, as a new government analysis clearly shows.

“My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars,” Biden tweeted on Sept. 25 from his White House account. “Instead of wasting money on tax breaks, loopholes and tax evasion for big corporations and the wealthy, we can make a once-in-a-generation investment in working America. And it adds zero dollars to the national debt.”

In the ensuing weeks, that lie got repeated by others. That includes White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who told gullible leftists in the mainstream media that the bill would cost nothing, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who added the novel twist that the massive bill is “fully paid for.”

Since the lie went out over official social media, it wasn’t a slip of the tongue or the accidental hyperbole of a man in obvious age-related mental decline. It was an official White House policy statement, one that makes Biden’s whole administration look profoundly foolish, dishonest and deceitful.

No person with any schooling in basic math, economics, statistics or, alternatively, simply having plain common sense, would believe that spending trillions of dollars on nonproductive programs would actually result in zero net costs without massive added tax hikes. It’s simply not real.

That’s where the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) enters the picture. As it turns out, estimates for Biden’s plan from the CBO, the nonpartisan congressional think tank that officially “scores” new legislation for what it would cost the U.S. Treasury, show it would be the largest spending program ever undertaken by the U.S. And no, its costs aren’t zero.

The CBO concludes that the Build Back Better bonanza would add $3 trillion to U.S. deficits by 2031, an amount most would agree is a bit north of “zero.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/14/a-compendium-of-hate-crime-hoaxes-jussie-smolletts-was-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/

There are opinions, announcements and news events that the media hivemind suppresses through news blackouts believing that if a news event is not reported then it is not news, and people will not know, similar to the philosophical conundrum of, if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear, has it made a noise? One of these taboo topics is hate crime hoaxes, since it jars with the media hivemind’s goal of convincing people, particularly blacks, of the idea of “systemic racism” in our society as a means of promoting a race war and peddling CRT.

Over recent years, I have cataloged a large number of hate crime hoaxes involving Muslims, gays, and blacks (I have also compiled a long list of fraudulent accusations of rape, but that is a topic for another time). The reason I have done so stems from my research background: I prefer data (i.e., facts) as opposed to verbosity. If I write an eloquent essay stating that hoaxes are common, a leftist can counter with an equally eloquent essay stating that they are rare (this has occurred in other topics with sophists writing that the media hivemind is impartial and that there is no censorship in universities). But, if I cite facts, a leftist’s verbal diarrhea is ineffective.

Here, then, are some of the participants in the Oppression Olympics:

At Emory University, a black employee vandalized vending machines and wrote racist graffiti and swastikas before being discovered. The university did not disclose the race of the employee.

A black woman pretended to be a 6-foot-tall white Klansman and sent death threats to her neighbors.

A black student at East Carolina University posted a racist invitation to a fraternity party that read, “No blacks.”