Beware the linguistic Trojan horse: Lionel Shriver

https://spectator.us/topic/beware-linguistic-trojan-horse-dictionaries/

Print dictionaries used to act as drags on popular misunderstandings (no, ‘notorious’ does not mean ‘famous’)

It’s the bane of many an author these days: those newspaper-filler Q&As. One I recently filled out included the question: ‘What’s the book you’re never without?’ Of course, there’s no book I lug about with me everywhere, but inanity comes with this territory. I responded: ‘A tattered, duct-taped blue hardcover of my Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (based on Webster’s Third) published in 1969.’

Lame? Actually, no. Access to older analogue dictionaries has become politically invaluable.

Pre-internet, august dictionaries such as Webster’s and the OED functioned as linguistic anchors. Beneficially slow to adapt and resistant to vernacular fashion, print editions that were expensive to reissue acted as drags on popular misunderstandings (no, ‘notorious’ does not mean ‘famous’). By calling us to shared agreement on what words did and didn’t mean, hard-copy dictionaries helped facilitate clear, precise communication. But online dictionaries have jettisoned this conservative purpose. Capable of being updated daily, digital definitions change with the wind, and are eternally playing catch-up with galloping popular ignorance. The hoi polloi, not the fuddy-duddies, are in charge.

This leaves English susceptible to witlessness, yet also to deliberate manipulation. We’re not talking merely about rapidly evolving slang, but about the meaning of staple, commonplace vocabulary, revised definitions of which can slyly import partisan ideological baggage to everyday discourse.

The political effort to limit free speech attacks our own values By Jonathan Turley

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/540235-the-political-effort-to-limit-free-speech-attacks-our-own-values

English essayist Samuel Johnson wrote that “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” I thought of Johnson’s words in preparing to appear before a House committee exploring limitations on free speech, including a campaign by some Democratic members and activists to remove networks like Fox News from cable carriers. As someone who just came over to Fox News as a legal analyst from CBS and the BBC, the hearing concentrated my mind “wonderfully” on the future of free speech and the free press.

Increasingly, free speech in the United States is described as a danger that needs to be controlled, as opposed to the very value that defines us as a people. While I am viewed as a “free speech purist” by many, I maintain what once was a mainstream view of free speech. I believe free speech is the greatest protection against bad speech. That view is, admittedly, under fire and may even be a minority view today. But history has shown that public or private censorship does not produce better speech. It only produces more censorship and more controlled speech.

There is no disagreement that we face a torrent of false, hateful, extremist speech on social media and in other public forums. This speech is not without cost: It fuels those filled with rage, victimizes the gullible, and alienates the marginal in our society. It is a scourge, but not a new one.

The Constitution was written not only for times like these — it was written during times like these. Politics has always been something of a blood sport, literally. At the start of our Republic, the Republicans and Federalists were not trying to “cancel” one another in the contemporary sense; they were trying to kill each other in the actual sense, through measures like the Alien and Sedition Acts. There also were rampant false conspiracy theories about alliances with Great Britain, France, Spain, and other foreign powers. Newspapers and pamphleteers were highly biased and partisan.

Members of Congress are now pushing for public and private censorship on the internet and in other forums. They are being joined by an unprecedented alliance of academics, writers and activists calling for everything from censorship to incarceration to blacklists. For example, an article published in The Atlantic by Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods called for Chinese-style censorship of the internet, stating that “in the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”

Joe Biden’s Cabinet Nominees Prove His Unity Claims Are Garbage Unity to the left means playing God and governing like kings and queens. By Gabe Kaminsky

 https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/26/joe-bidens-cabinet-nominees-prove-his-unity-claims-are-a-lie/

In his first address on Nov. 7 to the nation after being prematurely crowned “president-elect” by the legacy media, Joe Biden called for “a time to heal” and urged for “unity.” At his January inauguration, President Biden did the same.

“With unity we can do great things. Important things. We can right wrongs. We can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome this deadly virus. We can reward work, rebuild the middle class, and make health care secure for all. We can deliver racial justice,” Biden said.

Then Biden signed the most executive orders (15) in his first day than any other U.S. President in history—notably eliminating the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission to properly educate students about America’s founding. His cabinet nominations also do not spell unity. They indicate the opposite.

Throughout this week, the secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Xavier Becerra sat before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Senate Finance committees for his confirmation hearings and notably dodged questions on his partial-birth abortion stance, and about suing nuns to force them into abortion coverage in 2017. The California attorney general is a far-left radical with zero public health experience or expertise.

Is BIDEN back in the BASEMENT?

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/politics/is-biden-back-in-the-basement/

Joe Biden appears to be the first president to skip doing a State of the Union Address which is typically done by the end of February by tradition. However, it is not uncommon that a president skips the State of the Union Address during the year in which they were inaugurated. Both Washington and John Adams delivered the address but Thomas Jefferson abandoned that practice in 1801, in favor of a written message. It was about 100 years later that the message was delivered by a speech before Congress by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913. That was an important year for it was not just the creation of the Federal Reserve, but also the Income Tax.

Since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech in 1934, the annual speech has become a tradition. Before 1934, it used to be more of a year-end speech delivered in December. However, the President would also take office in March rather than January. The 20th Amendment changed the opening time for congress moving the speech to January/February. Pelosi will forever be remembered as the only Speaker of the House to tear up Trump’s State of the Union Address, which was probably the most disrespectful treatment of the office of the president by anyone in history.

The Constitution requires the president to provide an update on the country. It does not specify any precise timing. What normally happens is the House and Senate set the date for the joint session of Congress. What has everyone concerned about is that in fact, Joe Biden said in January that it would be forthcoming. Then White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Feb. 16 that Biden’s first appearance before a joint session “was never planned to be in February.” This has led to rumors that he is back in the basement with bouts of dementia since Psaki is clearly trying to revise history. This is only made more plausible when members of the Democratic Party ask for Biden to relinquish his codes to launch nuclear weapons. That in itself raises serious questions about Biden and now no State of the Union after he said he would.

MUST SEE VIDEO: MEGYN KELLY INTERVIEWED BY BILL MAHER

https://www.aol.com/entertainment/megyn-kelly-says-she-pulled-her-children-from-schools-for-teaching-social-justice-stuff-170832568.html

Megyn Kelly says she pulled her children from private schools for going ‘hard left’ with ‘social justice stuff’

Megyn Kelly removed her children from private school because administrators “took a really hard turn toward social justice stuff,” the former Fox News host revealed to Bill Maher on Friday.

While appearing on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Kelly revisited her November decision to pull her children, sons Edward, 11, and Thatcher 7, and daughter Yardley, 9, whom she shares with husband Douglas Brunt, from their elite private schools in New York City.

“The schools have always been far-left, which doesn’t align with my own ideology, but I didn’t really care, most of my friends are liberals, it’s fine,” she said that month on her podcast The Megyn Kelly Show. “I come from Democrats as a family. I’m not offended at all by the ideology, and I lean center-left on some things.” Kelly also cited a blog post she said traveled through the parent community, allegedly at the suggestion of the school, titled If You Really Want to Make a Difference in Black Lives, Change How You Teach White Kids. “But they’ve gone around the bend. They have gone off the deep end,” she said.

During her Real Time appearance, Kelly admitted that she loved her children’s schools which were “definitely leftist” compared to her “center right” views. “But then they went hard left,” she told Maher. “Then they started to take a really hard turn toward social justice stuff.” Kelly described a “three-week experimental trans education program” that took place in her son’s third-grade class. “And it wasn’t about support,” she said. “We felt it was more about trying to convince them, like, ‘come on over.’ And the boys started to get confused.” Kelly said that she and other parents objected, which prompted an apology from the school.

In Defense of Multiracial Americanism By Edward Ring *****

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/26/in-defense-of-multiracial-americanism/

To broaden its assault on traditional American culture and values, and to account for the large and growing number of conservatives who are not “white,” the Left has now come up with a new concept, “multiracial whiteness.”

This term sprang into prominence with a guest column by Cristina Beltran published in the Washington Post last month. Beltran acknowledged that Trump’s performance with Latino voters actually improved between 2016 and 2020. She also acknowledged the “clearly Latino or African American” faces showing up in the January 6 incident at the U.S. capitol. Everything Beltran claims in her column is designed to further castigate “whiteness,” while acknowledging there are significant percentages of nonwhites who, as she puts it, “fervently backed the MAGA policy agenda, including its delusions and conspiracy theories.”

For example, one of the favored targets of the “antiracist” movement in the United States is the Proud Boys, who Beltran describes as a “neo-fascist” group. Their leader, Enrique Tarrio, is Afro-Cuban, which makes him Beltran’s prime example of so-called toxic “multiracial whiteness.” She claims the appeal of multiracial whiteness to nonwhites is “politics of aggression, exclusion, and domination.”

This sort of message isn’t restricted to leftist academics anymore. Beltran, a professor of “social and cultural analysis” at New York University, and her cohorts throughout academia now have the entire weight of America’s establishment institutions behind them.

Being “Less White”

A notorious and very recent example of institutionalized corporate anti-whiteness is a training seminar Coca-Cola posted for its employees, featuring tips on “how to be less white.” One of the slides (since taken down) stated that to “be less white” Coca-Cola employees (the white ones) should “be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be less ignorant, be more humble, listen, believe, break with apathy, break with white solidarity.”

Amnesty International’s Position on Navalny Is Unconscionable By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/amnesty-internationals-position-on-navalny-is-unconscionable/?itm_campaign=headline-

No matter what the organization says, Alexei Navalny is indeed a prisoner of conscience in Putin’s Russia.

A mnesty International has stripped jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of his “prisoner of conscience” status after the organization was “bombarded” with complaints highlighting some of his unseemly rhetoric from the past.

Navalny was nearly murdered by a nerve-agent attack last year, almost surely perpetrated by the Putin regime. His life was saved only after he was airlifted to Germany. Determined to return to Russia, Navalny flew back in January, at the same time releasing an investigation into the opulent lifestyles of Putin and other corrupt Russian oligarchs. Navalny was promptly arrested for violating the terms of his parole on an earlier sentence (for a trumped-up embezzlement conviction) by not checking in with a parole officer — from his German hospital bed, where he spent weeks in a coma. Initially held in a Moscow prison, he was recently moved to what is reportedly a “penal colony.”

Almost immediately after Amnesty labeled Navalny “a prisoner of conscience,” a concerted email effort by Putin allies was directed at the organization, pointing out some of the xenophobic statements Navalny made over a decade ago. Kremlin minions were deployed across social-media platforms spreading Navalny’s remarks regarding Muslims and immigrants, as well as a number of fake ones that fooled certain media outlets.

In response, Amnesty International quickly removed the “prisoner of conscience” designation, explaining, “we are no longer going to use the phrase ‘prisoner of conscience’ in regards to [Navalny] insofar as our law and policy department, having reviewed Navalny’s remarks from the mid-2000s, came to the conclusion that they meet the level of ‘hate speech.’”

If nobody’s home, who called out the Syria air strike? By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/if_nobodys_home_who_called_out_the_syria_airstrike.html

Seven weeks into his presidency, senile Joe Biden surprised many by calling in a Syria air strike.

It was puzzling, given that there seemed to be no immediate threat.  And that’s just for starters.

It was billed as a strike on pro-Iran militants stationed in the region, and in retaliation for an earlier strike of theirs against a U.S. installation.  That seems a little eyebrow-raising, given Biden’s eagerness to make nice with the mullahs.  Even that explanation has skeptics who call the whole thing laughable.

There are also those who think Biden is finishing up what President Obama started.  You know, for the legacy thing.  Favor to a pal.

What’s vivid is that questions are being raised about whether Joe really made the call.

First, note that his vice president, Kamala Harris, was kept out of the loop.  According to a report citing a White House official, she’s said to be steaming that nobody told her before it happened.  And she’s probably more steamed to learn that that news got out, advertising for everyone that her giggly round-heeled self is viewed, even in the Biden White House, as a lightweight.

But we already knew that.

What’s also news is that on more than one occasion, she’s publicly opposed attacking Syria.  Here’s her famous tweet everyone’s retweeting, exposing her supposed (in this case) hypocrisy:

The Danger of Appeasing the Mullahs by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17089/iran-appeasing-mullahs

Turkey and the European Union are on the same page when it comes to pursuing appeasement policies with the Iranian regime. How do the ruling mullahs of Iran repay the favor? Through assassinations and terror plots.

After the EU began pursuing ways of appeasing Iran, and after sanctions were lifted in 2015 due to the nuclear deal (which Iran never signed), Iran’s assassins and terror operatives ratcheted up their activities on the European soil.

Governments around the world need hold the Iranian regime accountable for its foreign adventurism and its reprehensible repression of dissent and peaceful protests at home. They must adopt a firm policy of expelling Iranian “diplomats” and intelligence agents like Assadi, who may be plotting further terrorist attacks. They also need to consider closing down Iranian embassies until Tehran halts its terror activities.

Turkey and the European Union are on the same page when it comes to pursuing appeasement policies with the Iranian regime. How do the ruling mullahs of Iran repay the favor? Through assassinations and terror plots.

This month, the Turkish authorities detained an Iranian diplomat, Mohammad Reza Naderzadeh, 43, for his role in killing an Iranian dissident, Massoud Molavi Vardanjani, in November 2019. Reportedly, the Iranian diplomat was a staff member in the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul and had forged travel documents for Ali Esfandiari, who orchestrated the assassination of Molavi Vardanjani.

The Iranian regime, it seems, targeted Molavi Vardanjani because of his social media campaign to expose corruption in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its elite Quds Force branch, and the theocrats’ military establishment. After serving as an intelligence officer for the Iranian government, he defected. “I will root out the corrupt mafia commanders…,” he wrote on social media. “Pray that they don’t kill me before I do this.”

‘Minari’ Shares One Family’s American Dream Of Yearning To Belong By Josh Shepherd

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/26/minari-shares-one-familys-american-dream-of-yearning-to-belong/

Director Lee Isaac Chung and co-star Yuh-Jung Youn discuss ‘Minari,’ a drama that shows the importance of family ties and faith in the American experience.

After five decades on-screen, 73-year-old actress Yuh-Jung Youn has been winning global accolades this year. In “Minari,” released Friday via on-demand platforms, she co-stars as a no-nonsense grandmother — not unlike herself — in the story of an immigrant family that moves to Arkansas to pursue the American dream.

Youn demurs when asked how the film speaks to current events. “I’m sure everybody has a different opinion,” she told me in an interview. “Always when I have a premiere in [South] Korea, they ask: ‘What message should we get from this movie?’ But I’m not some kind of crusader! If people feel something or are moved by this movie, I’ll be very grateful.”

Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung loosely based the story on his childhood, when English and Korean were spoken interchangeably at home. In the mid-1980s, his father (fictionalized as Jacob in the film) bought a plot of land in Lincoln, Ark. aiming to raise a farm — and a better life for his family.

His wife Monica isn’t so convinced their sacrifices will be successful. Their children, seven-year-old David and older sister Anne, are alternately diverted by and complaining about their unfamiliar new home.

Awards buzz for “Minari” has come in part due to what many consider to be a snub. The Golden Globe Awards, to be telecast on Sunday night, nominated it in their Best Foreign Language Film category. Yet that association did not consider it for Best Film, despite being shot in Oklahoma by an Asian-American filmmaker. Insiders await Oscar nominations on March 15 to see if it fares better with the Academy.